
III 



US 



&W? 



iilillilil 

■■Hi 




A*" 


















/, 



/- 












^ ^ N 



,/ . 









.?*% 



r - 



-vrW: x v.p -;;«.?• 



• V 









>* 






^> V 




>i - - 



<H Xi, 



^ .;« »' ■» .v 









A* y ' J ^ 













.*> ^ 



v 



v0°, 



f*k X 



3 ^ 



^r *" k 












■ 













^a55SX^- ^ 



BY THE SAME AUTHOK. 



I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH 

LITERATURE. lectures deliv- 
ered before the Lowell Institute, 
Boston. 12mo., cloth, $1.75. 

"The book is one which, cannot be too highly 
recommended to those who have began to think 
earnestly, or care to begin."— Utica Herald. 

" In a word, it sinks the little in the great, and 
broadens the individual by the impression of the 
world's life." — Evening Mail. 

"Political and literary movements exert recip- 
rocal effects on each other ; hence, Professor 
Bascom's lectures will be found practically use- 
ful, both by historical -and literary scholars." — 
Cincinnati Gazette. 

"One may be familiar with the multitude of 
successive authors whose productions form the 
vast treasury of English literature, and yet wholly 
lack an understanding of. the conditions which 
sxirroundecl them, the influences which directed 
them, and the relation which they hold to one 
another." — Chicago Tribune. 

II. THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOL- 

OGY. 12mo., cloth, $1.75. 

"To the few who think, investigate, and seek 
the substance of things, the reading of this book 
will be of rare delight. 

" It is the most important contribution to men- 
tal science recently given to the public." — San 
Francisco Bulletin. 

III. SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND 

RELIGION. 12mo. cloth, $1.75. 

"Vigorous, thoughtful, sometimes brilliant 
and uncommonly refreshing." — Boston Common- 
wealth. 

G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers, Xeiv York. 



Philosophy of Religion 



RATIONAL GROUNDS OF RELIGIOUS 
BELIEF 



TOHN BASCOM 

M 

AUTHOR OF " PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY," " PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH 

LITERATURE," "^ESTHETICS," ETC. 



NEW YORK 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

182 Fifth Avenue 

1876 







T&Ls-i 



Copyright. 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS. 

1876. 

J X- tort I 



PREFACE. 



IT is a rare pleasure to one who speaks or writes from 
conviction to find persons interested in the discussion. 
When this is denied him, the only sufficient recompense is 
a firm persuasion of the intrinsic value of the truths uttered, 
accompanied with the belief that they will sooner or later 
win attention. In presenting to the public a Philosophy 
of Religion we sustain our courage by the last considera- 
tion. We have quietly estimated our audience, and are so 
in a measure prepared for the issue. Scientists, confirmed 
if not arrogant in their own views, will pass our work 
slightingly, as one more of the inexhaustible brood of met- 
aphysics and theology, of any one of which the kindest 
thing that can be said is, It may as well not have been ; the 
spent force of an effete method. We have this advantage 
over them ; we do and shall profit by their labors, and can 
take the honey from their hive while we escape its stings. 
It is a lesson they may do well to learn. One can ill 
afford to be supercilious toward any class of laborious 
inquirers. 

There is a second and larger division of scientific 
workers from whom we expect more, but not as much as 
we would be glad to expect. They are those who grasp 
firmly in the right hand the theories, often the extreme 
theories of science, evolution and universal, necessary law ; 
and in the left, certain remnants of religious faith, and 



then adopt the motto of charity, that the one hand shall 
not know what the other hand doeth. They thus leap the 
chasm, or rather pretend to leap it, which divides the 
physical from the spiritual world, turn the back on the one 
field when they enter the other, and are content to declare, 
that nothing from this quarter does or shall come in con- 
flict with anything in that quarter. The steeds of science 
and religion are mutually houghed the moment they over- 
pass their prescribed bounds. This is an attitude too 
illogical, too much one of will, of easy compromise, too 
little one of pure and unflinching reason, to make us very 
hopeful. A position whose chief commendation is its 
comfort is one not easily broken up. Till the deep-seated, 
radical opposition that really exists between the scientific 
temper and the truly spiritual -temper, between the spirit 
with which the conclusions of science are constructed into 
a universe and the spirit which religion expresses, is felt, we 
shall have little expectation of an earnest effort to close 
the conflict ; of a disposition to lend an attentive ear to a 
readjustment of claims and a union of conceptions in a 
harmonious, spiritually vital cosmos. 

There is a third, a bolder class, but one enclosed in 
the pale of faith rather than of science, whose attitude is 
allied to that of those last mentioned. They accept 
religious truth with a firm though conventional belief; 
neither do they doubt the conclusions of science. They 
take up knowledge in a fragmentary way, and often fall 
into illogical and contradictory applications of it. They 
suspect that there are minor conflicts between science and 
religion, which a few, in a hostile, skeptical spirit, are 
pushing into the foreground, and so doing a needless mis- 
chief, but they have no insight into the settled, fundamental 
antagonism between the two methods of viewing the world, 
nor do they at all understand how sweeping in the end 



must be the victory of the one or the other of them. They 
take a superficial view of the events transpiring in the 
social, scientific and religious fields, watch without fear 
their great conflicts, and move lightly about in- the currents 
of thought that happen to entangle them. There is not 
stringency enough in such natures to prepare them either 
to understand or to relish the earnest and bold handling 
of truth, especially those truths which pertain to religion 
— dependent everywhere upon conventional safeguards. 
They see no need of the bold word, nor do they themselves 
find any joy in it. It is a disturbance whose mischief is ' 
immediate and certain, whose advantages are remote and 
obscure. Here again we would be glad to hope for more 
than we dare to expect. 

A fourth class, the religionists, will settle us at once 
with that preordained eye-shot of theirs that admits of 
neither delay nor mistake, and has made them from the 
beginning the vicegerents of Heaven. We must condemn 
ourselves just here still farther by taking some true words 
from that ill-omened source, Renan. " Sensitive like all 
powers that claim for themselves a divine source, religions 
naturally construe as hostility even the most respectful 
expressions of difference, and see enemies in all who exer- 
cise on them the simplest rights of reason."* We regret 
this hasty antagonism which inquiry calls forth. If the 
assumption on which it proceeds were true, that the points 
of faith have been sufficiently and repeatedly settled, we 
should still regret it, for we remember that the individual 
must have time and liberty in adopting and using the best 
conclusions. Yet we think better of the religionists than 
they ever can of us. We look upon them as often most 
earnest when most narrow; while they regard us as at 
once narrow and wicked. Compelled to retire, we do so 

* Religious History and Criticism, p. 42. 



with the moral advantage of a charity which forbids a harsh 
judgment. 

There is one division in the religious world whom we 
greatly dislike either to offend or to trouble, those sincere, 
timid believers who dare not themselves venture, nor can 
they wish others to venture, beyond the old intrenched 
lines of faith, lest they should be caught up and spirited 
away altogether. Their feelings are expressed by Landor: 
" Be convinced, Mr. Middleton, that you will never supplant 
the received ideas of God ; be no less convinced that the 
sum of all your labors in this field will be to leave the 
ground loose beneath you, and he who comes after you 
will sink."* Because our religious conceptions are slowly 
changed, we do not therefore deem them incapable of 
change. Improvement is open -to us here as elsewhere, if 
we have the patience to command it. We can not sympa- 
thize with the timidity and distrust which forbid advance 
lest it should turn into retreat and rout ; nor with those 
who, suspecting that things are not quite right, distrust 
their and our ability to make them better. We can only 
say to these our Christian brethren, whom we dearly love, 
We leave you the camp, we enter on our warfare at our 
own charges, and are more content to lose life elsewhere 
than to tarry in a position which in our own thoughts we 
have surrendered. We ask nothing of you but the charity 
of your love, nor even this if you can not conscientiously 
give it. 

We hope to gather our attentive readers from those 
devout yet bold minds who feel that the old must be con- 
tinually reshaped and made ready for the new ; that dog- 
matism is a stone-wall at best, and can never offer a safe 
or lasting retreat when its defenders are losing manly 
ascendency ; that religion is often most fatally betrayed by 
* Imaginary Conversations, vol. i, p. 352. 



those who stand up most confidently in its aefense ; and 
that under its ostensible ramparts lie mines in a hundred 
directions whose explosion is sure to engulf many believers. 
We look for justification to that increasing class who 
believe that many old questions are to be reopened, that 
few primary conclusions are ever permanently closed, that 
reason is to be constantly allowed a freer, bolder, more 
critical handling of the conditions of faith, that conven- 
tional forces should offer no barriers to speculation, that 
we are always losing faith in losing religious liberty, and 
that earnest minds should ever commit themselves anew to 
God and the future, with the lights of the past and the 
present shining on their pathway. 

We wish to believe, we do believe, and to this end we 
must be left to find the grounds of belief. Nothing so 
benumbs our faculties and arrests our faith as the words 
of those who pretend to settle for us conditions ; who offer 
to us antique propositions, not living experiences. We say 
nothing of originality in our opinions. When it is present 
it may do little to commend them. We only say, we walk 
by this light, we are blessed by it, it is free to all who can 
use it. We do not pretend that it is divine light in any 
other sense than that all light is from the Father of lights, 
from whom cometh down every good and perfect gift. We 
can urge no discipleship — alas that the disciple is so often 
the proselyte — with a Thus-said-the-Lord. We trust 
indeed that he speaks to us by word, work and spiritual 
insight ; but we know not that this his message to us is 
exactly that which he is preparing for another. We ven- 
ture to sow, knowing that the soil is after all the best dis- 
criminator between living and dead seed. 

The purpose we have hoped to accomplish by this work 
is a clear pointing out of that in the constitution of the 
mind which justifies and supports religious faith, the ante- 



cedent conditions of philosophy which are essential to the 
Christian system, the beliefs concerning the soul of man 
which infold ultimately the fortunes of religion. We would 
expose the logical tendencies of misbelief and unbelief, 
and not leave them to fire their mines before we are aware 
of any danger. We wish not so much to deny as to entirely 
reverse the statement of Morley. " It has been said that 
religion is at the cradle of every nation and philosophy at 
its grave ; it is at least true that the cradle of philosophy 
is the open grave of religion."* Rational life makes way 
for religious life, and philosophy is the double-leaved door 
of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

We desire to develop the inherent, logical connections 
of doctrine and doctrine, system and system ; and to save 
and fortify faith by restoring to -the light its sufficient and 
rational grounds in our spiritual nature, in the fundamental 
facts of our own being. This labor we quietly submit to 
the uses of those who call for it. 

* Rousseau, vol. ii, p. 259. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUCTION. 

PAGE 

Current opinion as to the bounds of knowledge I 

These bounds to be settled by philosophy 3 

The philosophy now associated with science 5 

Need of a sound philosophy in this relation 6 

Spencer — His ultimate position 7 

His foundation of belief. 8 

His materialism 9 

Science may progress without sound philosophy 10 

Religion can not 11 

Our effort is to present the philosophy which underlies religion. . 13 



. CHAPTER I. 

A Statement of Mental Powers. 

Consciousness 14 

Division of powers . . 17 

The substance of knowledge 18 

The form of knowledge . 19 

Existence 20 

Number 21 

Resemblance 22 

Contrasted facts of space and consciousness 23 

Spontaneity 25 

Thought defined 27 

Kinds of intelligence 27 



CHAPTER II. 
The Being of Matter and of Mind. 

PAGE 

Direct knowledge defined , 29 

The method by which we arrive at real being 30 

At external being . 31 

At internal being 32 

The limits of causation ...... 33 

The limits of intuitions 34 

Knowledge of matter and mind not direct 35 

First objection to direct knowledge, Substance and phenomena 

confounded. . . 36 

Second objection, Office of consciousness confounded 37 

Third objection, No support in ordinaiy language 38 

Fourth objection, If substance is known directly, we should know 

certainly its precise form 40 

Fifth objection, A loss of realism. . . •. 42 

Sixth objection, The facts of vivisection 43 

Seventh objection, The manner of the rise of the doctrine 44 

It gives no greater security to realism than that derived from 

intuition 44 

CHAPTER III. 
The Being of God. 

The fundamental religious fact is the being of God 46 

Liberty made possible by the moral nature 47 

The proof of the being of God turns on liberty , 47 

Law or chance, a false contrast 48 

Thought spontaneous 49 

Spontaneity and force discriminated 50 

Spontaneity must underlie thought 55 

Spontaneity does not exclude order 57 

Spontaneity underlies liberty 58 

The proof of the being of God dependent on liberty 60 

Cosmological argument 60 

Teleological argument 63 

Ethico-logical argument 67 

These arguments, if allowed to succeed yet fail of explanation.. . 71 



CONTENTS. Xlll 

PAGH 

Pantheism the only logical result 72 

One philosophy for all intelligence 73 

The intuitive proof 76 

The sufficient proof. 77 

Objections 79 

The ultimate force of proof 81 

Its dependence on liberty 83 

CHAPTER IV. 
Attributes of God. 

Method of their establishment 84 

God as infinite 85 

Spencer's criticism of the Infinite 86 

Mansel's criticism 89 

The true formula of the Infinite 94 

Thought and feeling combined in the discernment of truth 96 

The relation of divine attributes 97 

CHAPTER V. 
Nature. 

The view of matter as modified by the growth of knowledge .... 98 

Intuitive knowledge as contrasted with sensations 102 

The universe a middle term between man and God 104 

In discipline .' 105 

In disclosure 106 

In progress 108 

A supersensual substratum 109 

Its recognition by scientists ill 

The suffering in the world . 116 

Three cosmological views may be taken 123 

CHAPTER VI. 
Ma?i. 

Two elements in man 124 

Relation of man to lower organisms 125 

Intelligence of animals 126 



XIV CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

What is meant by liberty 133 

Consequences of its denial 135 

Its relation to God 137 

First objection to liberty urged by Dr. Hodge 138 

Second objection 14° 

Third objection 143 

Fourth objection 144 

Fifth and sixth objections 145 

The doctrine of liberty restated 150 

The growth of virtue 152 

God's government primarily moral 154 

Punishment rests on the moral nature 155 

The Scriptures rest on the moral nature 156 

God's government self-executing 161 

Conscience acts on what 163 

Two theories of morals 164 

(1) The intuitive theoiy best explains the most significant facts. . 165 

(2) Under it the moral progress of the world has been achieved . 166 

(3) It alone gives a basis for legal discipline 168 

Human government rests on the moral nature 172 

So also does the divine government 173 

A law of utilities cuts us off from God 175 

The loss of the moral nature the loss of liberty 177 

First principles in our spiritual constitution 180 

The moral nature operative in feebleness and darkness 181 

CHAPTER VII. 
Immortality. 

Belief in a future life dependent on that in the being of God. . . . 183 

This belief prior to Revelation 184 

Scriptures presuppose it 186 

The belief in immortality Weakened by scientific thought 1S7 

Proof of immortality found in moral nature 189 

Moral nature transcends the present life in its law 192 

The moral development incipient 197 

The loss of virtue irreparable 197 

Moral nature establishes a claim for immortality 198 

The hope of immortality 199 

The basis of the argument, faith in God and our moral nature. . . 200 



CHAPTER VIII. 
Revelation. 

PAGE 

Three questions — First, Why should there be a revelation ? 203 

Second, The relation of revelation to nature 208 

Third, The relation of revelation to reason 209 

Revelation submitted to reason 210 

Futility of any other view 211 

The Scriptures so accomplish their purpose 214 

Individual life maintained by this view 215 

Appeal to the Bible involves it 216 

Reform requires it 217 

Responsibility and reverence demand it 218 

The Bible calls for this freedom 219 

All thoughtful men exercise it 223 



CHAPTER IX. 

Miracles. 

Impossibility of half-way ground 225 

What a miracle involves 226 

Objections to miracles . 228 

Their grounds in philosophy 233 

The philosophical objection 241 

The scientific objection 243 

The moral objection '. 246 

The historical objection 249 

Counter-probabilities 250 

Concessions 255 

Purposes subserved by miracles 255 

The New Testament 260 

Failure of adverse criticism 262 

Miracles and prayer 265 

Prayer as modified by spiritual growth 271 



XVI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER X. 
Inspiration. 

PAGE 

Verbal inspiration 272 

Vagueness of the idea of inspiration 272 

The presumption against a supernatural inspiration 273 

Inspiration as interpreted by the Bible 276 

Authority sought, but not needed '. 279 

Impossible of attainment 281 

Inspiration proportionate to its office 284 

Historical truth 284 

Spiritual, truth 285 

Prophecy 287 

Inspiration narrows interpretation 291 

The Scriptural testimony to inspiration 293 

Difference in value of different parts -of Scripture 294 

Fantastic interpretation 295 

Difference in the ends pursued in Scripture 295 

Difference in its spirit 297 

Traces of natural forces 299 

Variety of style 300 

Authority claimed 302 

Divided opinion among the apostles 305 

Safety in the use of the Scriptures , 306 

The freedom of Christ and the apostles in their use 310 

CHAPTER XL 

Interpretation. 

The method of interpretation incident to equal inspiration 312 

A sound philosophy a prerequisite 314 

Two methods of dealing with philosophy 318 

Second prerequisite, Historical criticism 323 

Third prerequisite, Recognition of changing intellectual temper. . 325 

Fourth prerequisite, Recognition of evolution in truth 329 

The Old Testament 331 

The New Testament 333 

Growth in discipline 336 



CONTENTS. XVII 

PAGE 

Fifth prerequisite, search into the spirit as opposed to the letter. 339 

Conception of punishment 34 2 

Conception of the Lord's Supper 343 

Conception of the glory of God 344 

Revelation analogous to nature 345 

Man a party to the Kingdom of Heaven 34° 

Objections, man's inability to reach the truth 347 

Divisions 348 



CHAPTER XII. 
Primitive Facts. — Sin and Divine Law. 

Revelation designed to awaken powers 350 

The training twofold 351 

First condition, personality 352 

Second condition, universality 358 

Third condition, descent .' 361 

A scheme of discipline to be treated as a whole 368 

What the law of God is 372 

The growth of the individual and the race under it 375 

The personal element ever- present 378 

What is and what is not verifiable 380 

Discord 387 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Constructive Facts. — Trinity. — Christ. — His Divinity. — His 
Work. — Holy Spirit. — Sanctification. — The Church. 

The great constructive fact, the revelation in Christ 389 

This the ocsasion of the doctrine of the Trinity 391 

Can give it no formal statement 392 

Objections to such statements 392 

The Scripture proof 399 

The divinity of Christ 400 

The Scriptural proof. First principle 402 

Second principle 404 

Third principle 405 



XV111 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Attitude of Christ 406 

The divine in Christ 4°8 

His method of influence 4 10 

His words always turn on principles 414 

Are destructive 417 

Are constructive 419 

His relation to the natural and supernatural 420 

Relies on pure moral force 422 

His temper ;. .. . 423 

Suppositions concerning him 425 

Difficulties of an incarnation 427 

Of the denial of the supernatural in Christ 428 

Of every departure from the simple narrative 432 

The nature of Christ 432 

Purpose of the incarnation 434 

The historical proof of a vicarious atonement 435 

Not in sacrifices 435 

Not in the circumstances of the crucifixion 443 

Not in the nature of the sufferings 445 

Nor in kindred facts of history 446 

Nor in the growth of the doctrine 447 

Nor in the moral force of the doctrine 449 

Deficiency in moral proof • 450 

Virtue and vice incapable of transfer 451 

Vicarious atonement can not rest on justice 454 

Nor on the veracity of God 458 

Nor on the exigencies of government 459 

Nor on pure morality 462 

Escape from punishment receives undue emphasis 463 

Actual effects of the doctrine on morality 464 

Deficiency in religious force, inconsistent with 466 

The unity of God 466 

The real relation of Christ to us 467 

With Scriptural imagery c 469 

With the proper proportions .of truth 470 

With searching spiritual exegesis 473 

Purposes subserved by the incarnation 474 

A new revelation of God 474 

A new exposition of the law of spiritual life 475 

The vicarious element 477 



CONTENTS. XIX 

PAGE 

The work of the Holy Spirit 479 

The religionist and the moralist 480 

Indefiniteness to the imagination of the Holy Spirit 484 

The work of the Spirit 484 

Sanctification 487 

Prayer a condition 49 1 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Future Life. 

Future life involved in our moral nature 493 

Hence ruled by that nature in its conditions 494 

Revelation states the facts first on the side of positive law 495 

Repentance always in order 496 

Repentance always possible 499 

Four beliefs held concerning a future life 501 

The relation of the Scriptures to a future life 503 

Scriptural proof 506 

The adjective, eternal 515 

The Scriptures enforce simply first principles 516 

No dogmatic statement of a future life possible 517 

Eternal punishment morally inadmissible 517 

Punishment must be found dealing with immediate issues 520 

The reduction of motives 521 

Annihilation 524 

Sinlessness of the saved 525 

The judgment day 528 

The resurrection 529 

The method of Revelation on this topic 531 

The notion of the Jews 532 

Of the disciples 533 

Instructions of Christ 534 

Spirit of Scriptural interpretation 536 

CHAPTER XV. 
Lines and Conditions of Progress. 

Liberty the initial idea 537 

Can God make a better world ? 538 



XX CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Would quicker faculties aid man ? 543 

The extent of suffering in the world 54° 

The justice of God 548 

The unfolding of successive moral truths 550 

The natural and the supernatural 553 

The race and the individual . . 556 

The inclusive character of the Kingdom of Heaven 557 

The part played by priesthoods 559 

Religious unity '. 562 

All explanation conditioned on growth 563 

Science and religion 564 

The future 566 



INTRODUCTION. 



WHAT things may be known, and what may not be 
known ; in what directions inquiry may be profita- 
bly pushed, and in what it should be restrained ; what are 
the effete, and what are the living methods of investigation, 
are questions which have never been more warmly dis- 
cussed than at present, nor have ever received a greater 
variety of answers. Some of these solutions are of the 
most extravagant character. A leading daily paper on my 
table says, " We think the day is coming when it will be 
generally recognized that careful scientific observation is 
the most valuable labor performed in the world." The 
most valuable is the assertion ; and this value is affirmed, 
not of the thought to which observation ministers, but of 
the skillful search which renders its data. The statement 
is but the single straw indicating the great current with 
which our convictions and sentiments are ebbing away 
from the soul, outward through the senses, toward the 
physical world ; as if a mastery of this were better than a 
wise rule of the spirit 

The last issue of a popular science monthly, that lies 
beside the paper, says, through one of its contributors, 
" The question, Does space contain a finite number of 
cubic miles, or an infinite number ? is a perfectly intelli- 



2 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

gible and reasonable one, which remains to be answered by 
experime?it." O happy shade of Plato, separated by two 
thousand years from such speculation as this ! 

Nothing seems more to perplex and bewilder the wise 
men of the present, than the effort to keep apart the 
several branches and forms of knowledge, and to give to 
each the value that attaches to it in its own field. A 
scientific cannibalism, stupid and destructive, has fallen to 
us. Most of the labor of the past is set down as of little 
or no value, and impossible and absurd things are promised 
of mere methods. We are suffering from the first intoxi- 
cation of science, and are waiting for those deeper draughts 
that are to sober us again, for the wisdom of disappoint- 
ment. The departments of thought that have fallen into 
the most neglect, from this sudden uprise of physical 
science, are philosophy and theology; yet these are the 
departments to which the best sheaves of the new field 
shall ultimately be returned. We do not in the least regret 
the diversion. Since the race can not progress symmet- 
rically and uniformly, let it move eccentricly, irregularly, 
along divergent lines, as it is able. When the speculative 
thoughts of men shall again turn, as they certainly will 
turn, to the human soul, and its destinies, it will be with 
more wisdom, more insight, more faith ; with many another 
page of exploded promises, checked off from the remaining 
possibilities of error. 

In the mean time, we shall strive to hold fast to the 
true grounds of knowledge, the philosophy of knowledge, 
found in the mind itself. It is to the universal instrument 
and recipient of truth that we look ; it is by an inquiry 
into its powers that we hope to see the fields of acquisition 
marked out, and their ultimate value indicated. We are 
not discouraged by narrow successes. In searching for the 
foundations of true and sufficient knowledge, we still turn 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

to the faculties of knowing. Not till these are all recog- 
nized and classified, shall we be able to lay down the 
limits of inquiry, its various forms, the relation of these to 
each other, the modes of investigation peculiar to each, 
and their several degrees of authority. This knowledge 
of the soul itself, so far as it is exact and complete, gives 
us the principles involved in all knowledge, gives us the 
philosophy of knowledge. To this inquiry, no matter with 
how many chimerical results it has been attended, we 
return, knowing that the least gain here is wealth • that, 
without this recognition by the mind of what its own con- 
stitution makes possible to it, all conclusions are mere 
surmises, private dogma, the inertia of single minds rest- 
ing in a favorite attitude. We need hardly say that science, 
as science, is not only good, but the great, distinguishing 
good of our time. Nor has it failed to make valuable con- 
tributions to philosophy. Its results assume a doubtful, and 
even disastrous, character only when it attempts, by methods 
and ideas peculiar to it, to control or displace philosophy. 
Science is physical in its facts, philosophy is spiritual. 
This difference must ever divide them, and leave to phil- 
osophy an authority, in reference to ultimate truths, which 
it can never share with science, or delegate to it. The 
scientific unbelief of our time, outweighs its hereditary, 
religious belief, in our estimate of influences, not by numeri- 
cal force, but by intellectual vigor. It commands attention 
by its large absorption of the mental strength and activity 
of the age. 

Science has been closely identified with observation 
and induction. But observation must be guided, and the 
ideas that run before it, that institute inquiry, determine 
its directions, and classify its results, are those which 
spring from some deep insight, or fortunate guess, of the 
mind, some anticipation of the facts not yet disclosed, some 



4 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

inference that owes its leap forward, and its right to guide, 
to the secret efficiency of the thoughts evolving it. Thus 
it is the notion of the equivalence of forces, suggested by 
a first fact, that has been made the guiding light of inquiry 
in a hundred others. The facts themselves are not new, 
but the comprehension of them is, and sprang not from the 
senses, but from the mind using the senses under its own 
appropriate, interpreting idea. It is these forerunning 
thoughts, these apt conceptions, that make observation 
what it is ; and these are evolved by the sagacity of the 
mind in obeying its own laws, in accepting and testing its 
own hints. Mere observation is not fruitful, it is observa- 
tion made definite in form, and happy in direction, by the 
forecast of rational powers. The laws of rational insight 
lie thus at the core of verification, as they are in truth 
located at the centre of productive observation. Meteor- 
ology may be adduced as a field in which many fruitless 
facts have been collected, because as yet the idea, the law, 
or its suggestion, has not been hit upon, which is to weave 
them together, and disclose their bearings. To accumu- 
late observations is blind labor, till some theory is being 
tested or established by them, or the hint of a theory is 
being caught from them. 

Induction also rests on intuitive, primitive convic- 
tions such as this, Like effects accompany like causes ; 
and is, in every stage of its progress, passing over into 
deduction. Thus not only the laws of mind, but the logi- 
cal tests of validity, incident to its various forms of action, 
are present in all fruitful induction. The question in nat- 
ural science at present, preeminently interesting, is the 
origin of species, and the view under warmest discussion, 
is one of the most sweeping deductions on record. The 
theory of Darwin, in its peculiar, its expansive features, is 
exclusively deductive. There has not as yet been indue- 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

tively established a single coherent series of facts reaching 
to the length of the desired conclusion, and incapable of 
another construction. Indeed, extended and decisive 
and inductive data are very likely impossible to this view. 
The conclusions of geology are, the larger share of them, 
deductive ; and as deduction is the stepping of the mind 
quite beyond the senses, is a free, bold, intellectual stride, 
we must know the laws of mind thoroughly, if we would 
justify, in any department of science, its reasonings, and 
see the final authority of its conclusions. 

Lacking this foundation of a sound philosophy, 
scientists, or rather that small, but very energetic, portion 
of them that is tinctured with positivism, hold a very 
anomalous position. In England, the philosophy of the 
distinctive scientific movement has been transmitted to it 
chiefly through Locke, Hume, Mill, Spencer, and bears, in 
its ultimate premises, the most vague, wavering, uncertain 
aspect. Its skeptical tendency is so complete that it logic- 
ally taints every conclusion. No system ever rested on 
more vacillating premises. Positivism, the exaltation of 
sensational knowledge, a philosophy that would build 
granite structures of truth on the slippery sands of denial 
and unbelief, that prepares the way for trusting the per- 
ceptions by a distrust of the intuitions of the mind, every- 
where colors its conclusions, even when formally rejected 
by it. 

Theological dogma has at least this advantage, that it 
cultivates faith, a rational repose in the mind itself, and 
thus provides a coherent, tenacious substructure for its 
edifice. Positivism starts in sweeping denials, yet wishes 
to end in a substitution of exact knowledge, so called, for 
the beliefs which have, up to the present time, underlain 
the world's creed and practice. This is an effort to evoke 
creation out of chaos, affirmation out of denial, something 



6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

out of nothing, in the intellectual world. Till starting 
points are better taken, this speculation can be but a cloud 
driven by the wind. It may spread over a wide territory, 
and hide much of the heavens, but it can not hold what it 
wins, nor tarry where it chances to rest. 

We insist on the necessity of a sound philosophy, under- 
lying scientific knowledge, if w T e do not wish this to break 
its limits, and endanger by crude speculation our. best pos- 
sessions ; and we draw attention at two other points to 
the vague, wavering conclusions of that science which is 
working its way forward, with such a recognition only of 
philosophy as favors its own ends. The results of inquiries 
which lie strictly within the scope of science, do not indeed 
thereby lose their correctness, but they are sadly crippled 
and perverted in their relations to human life and well- 
being. The first point is this, the philosophy of Spencer, 
that philosophy which has all along sustained the extreme 
scientific tendency, and is its constant ally, is unable to 
pronounce itself to be either idealism or materialism ■ it 
can determine the being neither of mind nor matter; and 
shuts itself up to the unsubstantial phenomena that pursue 
each other in consciousness, the consciousness of the indi- 
vidual. Spencer closes his First Principles v/ith these 
words, "The reasonings contained in the foregoing pages 
afford no support to either of the antagonist hypotheses 
respecting the ultimate nature of things. Their implica- 
tions are no more materialistic than they are spiritualistic, 
and no more spiritualistic than they are materialistic.' 1 
The one inadmissible thing is realism. The real in all 
directions is that which Spencer honors, and then waves 
off the stage with the appellation, The Unknowable. 

It is difficult indeed, in such a system to define truth, 
since there are no abiding realities to which it can be 
referred. It would seem as if the truths of the physical 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

world, so called, must, under this view, most of all lose 
substantial being, as each scientist can only affirm a cer- 
tain agreement in the impressions and ideas of his own 
mind, a uniformity of sequence in them, but is unable to 
put any valid, permanent existence back of them, either of 
a physical or spiritual nature. He can have no science 
sustained by the principles of a philosophy held in com- 
mon with another, since he dares to affirm nothing even of 
the being of that second mind ; nor of its phenomena ; nor 
of any common world between it and him. If he thinks 
and acts as though discussion were real, the parties to 
it real, and the objects of it substantial, he is accepting 
practically as authoritative, impressions to which he has 
refused to yield theoretic credence. 

Of what value can the formal relations of mental im- 
pressions be, when the very substance of those impressions 
is unsubstantial ? Of what value is the comparison of con- 
clusions, of facts, theories, systems, when the existence of 
one and all of the thing;s to which they pertain is an un- 
verified notion ; and the impressions themselves come and 
go, vapor-like, in the particular consciousness that enter- 
tains them ? Science thinks itself busy with an external 
world, and Spencer thinks himself in controversy with 
others. But both facts, and all kindred facts, are, and 
forever must be outside the pale of a philosophy that 
knows not whether it is materialism or idealism. It would 
seem as if no truth of any interest were left within it, as 
if the word, truth, were quite lost to it. The fact is, it 
tacitly avails itself of powers whose being it formally denies, 
and gives no sufficient basis for its own work, admirable as 
that work in many departments is. Yet this positive ten- 
dency, disparaging the laws of mind, rejecting its insight 
into causes efficient and final, has worked its way largely 
into science, and into the philosophy by which advanced 



O A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

scientists are striving to unite, enlarge, and consolidate 
their views. 

The second difficulty referred to, and one alike gross, 
appears in the foundations of belief. Hume ascribes belief 
to the vividness of impressions ; Spencer to their invaria- 
bleness. The two views are closely allied ; the one is 
more cautiously taken than the other. In neither case is 
the mind, by its own activity, discerning the truth, reach- 
ing facts or principles by its intuitions, but in both, the 
mind — though in theory there is no mind — is being made 
subject to the force, the iteration of its ideas. Belief is a 
fact of momentum with Hume, and one of inertia with 
Spencer. The impression that is is ; and the force with 
which it occupies consciousness, or the pertinacity with 
which it returns to it, is its measure of power, and this 
power we call belief. This statement annihilates all dif- 
ference between the false and the true in belief, except 
that which is found in the vigor and time of occupancy. 
In this system not only is possession nine points in law, 
it would seem to be the entire ten. The belief in a miracle 
is as good as the denial of it, nay better, if it be more vivid 
or more pertinacious. With reversed impressions reversed 
conclusions follow, and the prevailing opinion is the true 
opinion, as truth and prevalence are different expressions 
for the same thing. Thus belief rests on the same basis 
as physical tastes. The enjoyment of food is the final fact 
that proves our relish for it. For one to urge the details 
of his appetites, his culinary opinions, on another is im- 
pertinence ; for it is the fact of vivid, agreeable impressions 
in himself, and this only, that each pronounces upon. Dis- 
cordant facts, like those of gustatory sensations, can find 
no grounds of change in argument ; nor can they afford any 
interest in statement. If a belief is altered by proof as 
proof, it is so in the face of this philosophy ; since belief 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

merely expresses the fact of the predominant occupation 
of consciousness by an idea ; and this fact as a fact meets 
no contradiction in an argument. Forgetfulness is the true 
subversive agency. A belief may be displaced, but not 
refuted; and the new belief has no better intellectual foun- 
dation than the old one. Sluggishness is the mordant of 
opinion. 

Hume frankly accepted these conclusions, and so made 
his philosophy to be one of systematic skepticism. No 
better foundation would seem to underlie the science affil- 
iated directly or indirectly with positivism — a word which 
should mean positive in the most narrow and dogmatic way. 

We instance these fundamental weaknesses in the 
extreme, yet most fruitful scientific spirit of our time, not by 
way of criticism, but to show that we can here find no suffi- 
cient guidance to philosophy, and that we must search 
elsewhere for those principles of knowledge which give us 
the limits of inquiry. Missing these, we may make minor 
gains, but shall suffer we know not what losses, as unbelief 
works its way among the spiritual truths of our being. 

We shall speak of the philosophy of Spencer as mate- 
rialistic, not because we wish to employ a word of reproach, 
but because we wish to express clearly, what we regard as 
the latent sympathies of his doctrines. These are mate- 
rialistic in the most important respects. The germ and 
norm of all growth, are found by him in material phenom- 
ena. It is material laws that shape events ; physical 
forces, that with necessary, unimpeded development in- 
fold and unfold the universe in all its phases. Necessity, 
the transition or flow of indestructible forces, complete in 
themselves, these are the distinguishing features of the 
material world, and a philosophy that contemplates phe- 
nomena as shaped by these only is, in a most important 
sense, materialistic, since it breaks down the division 



IO A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

between the powers of matter and mind, in favor of mat- 
ter. It is material laws, and these only, that it deals with ; 
though it affirms nothing of the substratum of being from 
which they spring. 

If philosophy sustains science, even more obviously 
does it religion. It is to the philosophy of religion, or 
the foundations of religious belief in mental science, that 
our attention is to be directed. The very facts on whose 
existence religion depends, the objects toward which it is 
directed, turn for their proof of being on the joint intui- 
tive and reflective processes of the soul, and till these are 
defined and accepted, those can not be established. 
Science directs its inquiries to facts which are reached by 
the senses. Men follow their senses, complex and spirit- 
ual in their action though they be, in spite of their philoso- 
phy. Theory has never been able so to give the lie to 
these first activities of the soul as to destroy our trust in 
them. Amid all conflicts of authority, the senses, no mat- 
ter what their theoretical estimate may be, are sure to 
win a practical victory. Science not only unites itself to 
these first and most vivid inlets of knowledge, its results 
are often immediately and physically serviceable, so that it 
makes a second bid to the appetites, passions, desires. 
Science is thus closely united to the superficial currents of 
the soul, and gains immediate momentum from them, even 
though philosophy may have given its conclusions no suffi- 
cient basis. Religion, on the other hand, deals with invisi- 
ble things, with God, the soul and immortality. These 
suffer in vividness of impression by contrast with sensa- 
tions. Their primary hold is more weak and variable ; 
and for their secondary hold they must rest on the mind 
and heart, on the clearness with which we have analyzed 
our intuitive, reflective powers, and the confidence we have 
been wont to repose in them. 



INTRODUCTION. 1 1 

Nor is religion, pure religion, any more immediately 
powerful in its relation to pleasure, than in its relation to 
sensation. It is indeed an independent and prolific source 
of enjoyment, but enjoyment of so lofty and derived a 
character, that it establishes no controlling current in the 
inexperienced mind. Its first action is likely to be one 
of restraint and censure, and thus the soul, in its early 
impulses, brute liberties, and passionate waywardness, is 
only too much inclined either to be emancipated from it, 
or to subvert it. Religion, therefore, other than blind 
superstition appealing to interests, or playing upon fears, 
stands in urgent need of the aid of philosophy, in securing 
for the facts which sustain it their due weight upon the 
mind. 

Again, the powers which religion demands in the soul, 
by whose possession the data of religion are made pos- 
sible and fit, rest for confirmation on mental science exclu- 
sively. Men do, it is true, in the outset easily believe in 
liberty, but later the notion becomes vague and uncertain. 
It is found to be in direct contradiction to all that trans- 
pires in the physical world, and to meet with no confirma- 
tion outside the mind, outside the circle of spiritual data 
of which it is the postulate. Hence the thoughts, under 
the influence of the senses, under the instruction of science, 
slip the notion of liberty, or so modify it as greatly to 
weaken the sense of obligation, of power to meet, and 
responsibility in meeting, the liabilities of life. The spir- 
itual strength is relaxed, and the mind more or less com- 
pletely succumbs to the prevalent forces that float it 
onward. It speculates more than it acts, and theorizes 
when it should be wakeful to the simple duties before it. 

The very law also, the hidden seat of ethical authority 
in the soul, the voice of God within us, to which he takes 
appeal in every precept, rests for the proof of its existence, 



12 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the nature and authority of its declarations, on philosophy. 
If this is, after all, as many would have us believe, only the 
echo of our own interests, and the general interests, the 
whispered words of self-interest that have run up and 
down society, till they have at length become more or less 
audible in every soul, gathering and reverberating them, 
as the chambers of a sea-shell the motions of air and 
water ; or if some obscure experience has by transmission 
and growth ripened into an instinctive feeling we call con- 
science, then alas for religion. What we had taken as a 
means of understanding and obeying God, is after all only 
an acquired notion, gradually working its way into a con- 
ventional rule, by which we herd pleasantly and profitably 
with each other. If there be any law of God other than a 
physical law, that law must find its final enforcement in 
the rational response of each soul itself to it. The word 
of authority from without is nothing, unless there is an 
answering word from within ; and the adoption and affirm- 
ation by the soul itself of God's law, turn on the estab- 
lishment of the moral nature in its primitive, independent 
strength. Any other government is either whip and goad, 
or allurement. 

Such, then, is the close dependence of religion on 
philosophy. The seat of religion is in the soul itself, not 
in the senses, nor in the physical world ; and there must 
its sure foundations be explored. As we love God, as we 
value immortality, as we delight in the life which these 
conditions of our being spread before us, are we impelled 
again and again to renew the efforts by which the highway 
of faith and belief is thrown up, by which we escape from 
the visible into the invisible, and lay hold of the power to 
become the sons of God. 

Another effort in this direction is to engage us. We 
shall strive to see what spiritual powers the leading doc- 



INTRODUCTION. 1 3 

trines of religion imply in us, what support these doctrines 
derive from those powers, and what in turn they lend to 
them. Though the inquiries of science have very little 
direct bearing on the foundation facts of faith, they are 
often pushed forward under a philosophy which makes 
little or no room for these facts. Hence the more earnest 
reason for our present inquiry. We wish to see exactly 
what that philosophy is which underlies religion, — for 
assuredly religion presupposes in every one of its doctrines 
a philosophy, as these doctrines bear immediately on the 
nature of man, and derive their fitness from it — and to 
place the two in their interdependence on their common, 
most rational and defensible ground. To do this is to 
construct a philosophy of religion ; is to disclose its roots 
in our spiritual constitution, and to uncover the intellectual 
grounds of the facts which support it. 

This work falls to mental not to physical science. 
We are greatly indebted to scientists when they tacitly 
assume a sound philosophy, work as if matter and mind 
were both real, and busy themselves in a correct rendering 
of their phenomena, and a study of the laws of order found 
in them ; we only fall into confusion when we listen to the 
ultimate theories of knowledge which they propound. A 
philosophy which occupies itself only with impressions, 
which is avowedly a philosophy of impressions, may be 
serviceable in a superficial rendering of these, but ought, 
in all consistency, to be silent on questions which pertain 
to the secret nature, the origin and issue of things, the 
forecasting plans and underlying forces which sustain 
them. We render to science what belongs to science, to 
Caesar what is Caesar's, but we reserve to the human spirit 
and to God what is their own. We listen respectfully to 
the positive testimony of any man, but are more impatient 
of his negations. 



CHAPTER I. 

A Stateme7it of Mental Powers. 

AS we are to discuss the relations of religious truth to 
the mind itself, the support which it finds in our fac- 
ulties, we need to have clearly before us the system of 
psychology from which we take our departure. We shall, 
in the present chapter, concisely give the leading conclu- 
sions of a philosophy which we have elsewhere stated and 
defended at length. 

The fundamental condition of all knowledge is con- 
sciousness. By consciousness we mean the knowledge 
incident to the mind of its own states, its own phenomena. 
These phenomena fall into three divisions ; intellections, 
emotions, volitions. Consciousness is not itself a power of 
mind, active or passive ; intellectual, emotional or voli- 
tional ; but is involved in the powers of mind, one and all. 
No mental power can be exercised, save under this con- 
dition, that its putting forth is known to the mind. Con- 
sciousness is, therefore, the postulate of all knowledge, 
since it is conditional to a knowing power, to the mind's 
activity. The knowledge, however, that can be referred to 
mere consciousness is that of mental acts and states ; the 
farther knowledge which these acts and states may them- 
selves furnish is to be referred to the mind as a knowing 
agent. Consciousness is the condition of all knowledge, 
as the knowing act, of whatever nature, can not remain a 
knowing act, save on the terms of being a conscious act. 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 1 5 

Yet consciousness is the exclusive authority only for mental 
phenomena, as mere phenomena. These phenomena, as 
themselves acts of perception, intuition, reflection, are 
the grounds of the entire circle of secondary knowledge 
which they disclose to the mind. 

As consciousness is thus primary in knowing, entering 
in as an essential condition of every intellectual state, we 
naturally enough refer in language our knowledge of these 
states to it, as if it were itself a second, central power of 
knowing. Not thus is it to be conceived ; such a concep- 
tion is an illusion of speech. None of the powers thus 
put in the outer circle of knowing could have any effi- 
ciency, any meaning as faculties of knowledge, without 
it, their common characteristic. Nor could it, as an inner 
and separate act, yield its facts of knowledge, unless it it- 
self were permeated by a farther consciousness, disclosing 
its own activity. Every mental act, as itself single and final, 
is penetrated by consciousness, receives its character as a 
mental act from consciousness, and goes forth to its com- 
plete and sufficient work, because it is in itself light. If 
we miss this power in a first act of mind, we should for a 
like reason miss it in a second act • if we find it in a sec- 
ond act, we could equally well have found it in a first act. 

When we say, therefore, that consciousness discloses 
all mental acts, and is the starting point of knowledge, 
we avail ourselves of familiar language to express a fact in 
itself more simple than our statement, to wit, the fact, that 
the mind can not know without knowing, feel without 
feeling ; that its acts must, from its very nature, transpire 
in its own light. Ceasing to be known, they cease to be. 
Consciousness, then, speaking exactly, is the antecedent 
condition of knowledge, its essential characteristic ; its 
regulative idea ; as is space the controlling condition of 



l6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

physical facts. It is not itself an activity, but the form or 
method of a class of activities, to wit, thoughts, feelings, 
volitions. It is to be set down as the original category of 
a kind of being, to wit, intelligent being. It is thus to the 
mind an intuition, a direct, primitive apprehension of the 
antecedent ground of its own activity. When we say that 
consciousness discloses states of mind, we use a curt, famil- 
iar expression for the more exact one, the states of mind 
are, as activities or receptivities of mind, necessarily known 
to it. In no other way can they be states of mind. A 
regulative idea, like time or consciousness, has a double 
bearing. In reference to the facts it orders, it is a formal 
entity. Events are substantial entities ; the space and time 
in which they occur are formal entities. Thoughts, emo- 
tions are again substantial entities, of which consciousness 
is the formal entity. All the real, distinct, qualitative 
being involved in the case belongs to the thought, the emo- 
tion, though the formal element of this being is expressed 
in the word consciousness. The formal element or entity, 
when perceived by the mind as the condition of the sub- 
stantial or contained entity, is termed an intuition. 
Looked at in themselves, time, space, consciousness, are 
formal entities ; looked at in reference to the mind's per- 
ception of them, they are intuitions. 

Intellections, or products of the intellect, include, in the 
above division, perceptions and sensations, judgments, 
intuitions ; or products of the senses, of the judgment 
and the reason ; and these as restored or modified by 
memory and imagination. Mental states are often exceed- 
ingly complex, involving various kinds of more manifest 
and more obscure activity. Feeling promotes thought, but 
volition as an under-current sustains both, while perception, 
judgment, intuition are mingled in an obscure, intricate 
and perplexed way. The existence of a primary mental 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 1 7 

power, that is of the ability of the mind to act in a given 
way, is to be established by our analysis of mental states, 
by reaching the simplest constituents found in them, and 
by referring those like in kind to a single activity of 
mind as their source. This method assumes that noth- 
ing is present to the mind save by virtue of its capacities 
or powers ; and that products, distinct in kind and ulti- 
mate, that is simple and underived, imply corresponding 
faculties by which they are reached. Precisely this is 
what is meant by a power, the activity of the mind in 
furnishing itself with such and such elements of knowledge. 
This analysis of mental states affords evidence of the 
original, perceptive, intuitive powers of mind. A farther 
inquiry into the manner in which they are retained and com- 
bined brings to notice the secondary or reflective faculties. 
Conclusions so reached may be confirmed by language, by 
history, by anatomy, by comparative psychology. 

We accept under this method the following as the 
intellectual powers ; as primary faculties, those of per- 
ception or the senses, those of intuition or the reason ; as 
secondary faculties, those of reflection or the understand- 
ing. Among the last are to be included memory, im- 
agination, judgment. Perception, though it always con- 
tain as a nucleus a sense impression, is often most 
complex. It inwraps, in what seems a single and direct 
impression, the fruits of long experience, and the insight of 
reason, always present to furnish the comprehensive idea 
appropriate to each act. The difference between acquired 
and primitive perception, educated and uneducated sensa- 
tions in man, is strikingly seen in contrasting the action 
of one blindfolded with that of one to whom blindness 
has become familiar, and by whom its difficulties have been 
in a measure mastered. The first is almost helpless, the 
second has gained much of the knowledge and freedom 



l8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

incident to vision. Experience, combined with the lower 
senses only, rapidly expands suggestions so slight as to 
pass unregarded by one who sees, converts them into 
interpretation, constructive judgments, and by them so 
unfolds the conditions of ordinary action as to make it easy 
and direct. A blind boy may walk freely, even drive 
freely. I once asked such an one how he was able to 
determine the nearness of an obstacle, a tree or a fence ; 
or to tell when he reached the open road into which he 
turned. He replied that he thought he did it by the 
character of the sounds in their immediate neighborhood. 
He had formerly been in the habit of uttering a low whist- 
ling noise, to aid by its reverberations the ear in these 
decisions ; but now he no longer found this necessary. 
When questioned as to his present method of decision, 
when the air was still, he responded, the air is rarely or 
never still, rarely or never silent. Nature was thus to 
him full of gentle whispers, sounds unheard by us, by 
which she unceasingly, almost unconsciously imparted to 
him that most immediate and necessary knowledge, which 
gives to life, under her sheltering hand, activity, safety 
and pleasure. Educated perception is at the farthest 
possible remove from mere sensation ; the whole acquired 
power of the man is condensed in it. 

Sensations alone furnish the crudest material to the 
mind, a material altogether formless. The forms, that is 
the rational comprehensive ideas, such as space and time, 
under which the mind learns slowly with increasing 
exactness to work up and present this raw material, we 
believe to be brought forward by the mind itself in virtue 
of its own insight into each kind of being. We believe 
this because no analysis of the sensation as mere sensa- 
tion can furnish these ideas, nor indeed can any mind 
preceed to combine and relate sensations without presup- 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 19 

posing and involving the presence of one or more of 
these ideas. There may indeed be instinctive action, 
the product of organic stimulus and muscular mechanism, 
which may involve the practical observance of the con- 
ditions implied in regulative ideas, such as cause and effect, 
space, time ; but so does the flight of a cannon-ball. The 
tacit inherence in action of its appropriate conditions, and 
their distinct use in an intellectual apprehension of that 
action, are very different things. No stages of impercep- 
tible growth can bear conscious life from one to the other. 
The instinctive experience may be repeated, no matter 
how many times, it approaches no nearer by repetition 
an intelligent recognition of its own essential relations. 
To such a recognition, in all its degrees, the appropriate 
ideas must be antecedent, and as these ideas are not a 
portion of experiences themselves, but their interpreting 
light, they must be given otherwise than by the experi- 
ence they are to expound ; to this they are transcendental. 
It can provoke them but never yield them. Sensations may 
be similar, and result day by day in similar effects. Resem- 
blance may thus, as a regulative form, be present in the life 
of the brute. So is it also in the inorganic world. The 
rock is affected in like fashion by the sunshine, showers 
and frosts of successive seasons. But in neither case is there 
an apprehension of the agreement as an agreement. A 
prior condition to this is not simply consciousness, but the 
notion of resemblance ; and there is no tendency in a mere 
reiteration of impressions to induce this. A considerable 
period may elapse before the rational mind shall analyze 
out this from its other ideas, but standing first in logical 
order, in the act of comprehension, such an act can find 
no initiation without it. The conscious presence of these 
regulative ideas, in a concrete form, marks an epoch, con- 
stitutes a node in the development of intelligence. Pro- 



20 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

cesses are by it lifted into the light, which before pro- 
ceeded automatically in the darkness. 

The first of these ideas is existence. The simplest 
idea under which we contemplate everything, is that of 
being. In thinking anything, a sensation for instance, to 
be, the mind lifts itself above it as a mere experience, 
and takes one step in its investigation. The mind 
thus ceases simply to feel, and brings forward one 
idea for the elucidation of feeling, the notion of real 
being; an object about which it is ready to inquire. 
Of course this movement is initiated in an obscure, semi- 
conscious, concrete form ; and only slowly assumes a clear, 
sufficient, abstract statement. The second idea is number, 
though the third, resemblance, is closely united with it in 
application. Scarcely anything can be said to be single to 
the senses, and those things, as dots or grains of sand, 
which approach nearest unity have no more power to rep- 
resent a unit, than objects complicated in their parts. 
The grain of sand is one, but so is the earth on which it 
rests ; the dot is one, but equally so is the longest line we 
can draw through it. The mind settles for itself its units ; 
nor is its unit in one direction at all its unit in another. 
The unit of color does not explain the unit of heat, nor the 
unit of sound. The sensations of each are quite distinct. 
In fact the one as one is in no case given by the senses 
merely. The one is not a sensation, but a varying, flexible 
form of thought, which the mind brings to sensations for 
their convenient handling. Thus the line may be one 
line, or three feet, or thirty-six inches ; and these are 
all equally distinctions which the mind has set up for its 
own purposes. The marble which lies in the child's hand 
is necessarily seen and felt, but is not necessarily thought 
of as one ; nor as one only, till the mind has settled 
the method of contemplation. When the mind shall 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 21 

consider it under this category, it may do so under its 
cohesion as one, or under its colors as three, or under its 
zones as five, or under its meridians as many, or under its 
particles as involving a number indefinitely great. More- 
over, the numerical relations which the mind furnishes to 
the material of the senses, as a form or an explanatory 
method of handling, rest on an absolute identity or equiva- 
lence of units, of which the senses know nothing, and of 
which it is the perpetual labor of science to teach them 
sufficient to make its results practically reliable. The 
two and two which are equal to four, are, at some point of 
comparison which the mind has instituted, exact equiva- 
lents, equivalents in weight or capacity or length. The 
mind can, indeed, hold its units in air by its own specu- 
lative thought, aloof from everything, multiply and divide 
them, and institute between them changeable equations of 
value. This it does by keeping the senses at bay, or if it 
employs them, as in counting on one's fingers-ends, by 
assigning to their objects a purely typical or representative 
value. The moment, however, mathematics descends from 
the air, and begins to deal with realities, it assumes among 
them an equality never actually reached. We talk of inches 
and pounds and degrees, but we never reach their equiva- 
lents, or if we do, we do not know it. It is the perpetual 
and perplexing problem of science to lay down approxi- 
mately exact and stable units. 

Abstraction finds instant play in connection with num- 
ber. One color, one flavor, one quality, or one relation is 
singled out from others, and disjoined to the mind from 
that complex product in which the senses find it, but from 
which they may be wholly unable to separate it. One and 
many play up and down through all the united and divided 
things of nature, putting them, to the intellect, in new nu- 
merical relations of its own construction. 



22 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Resemblance, a third comprehensive category, is applied 
conjointly with number. This idea is, in its recognition as 
due to the reason, as old at least as the time of Plato. 
Likeness and unlikeness give constant occasion for numeri- 
cal distinctions. We reach the number of species in a 
genus by directing attention to differences ; the number of 
individuals in a species, by an observation of agreements. 
The units in our aggregates include every degree of like- 
ness, from the most complete correspondence to the mere 
fact of some form or other of distinct being, by which the 
idea of one is attached to each thing in the enumeration. 

Conceptions are the products of the mind under this 
idea of resemblance. However loosely the qualities are 
defined by which a general term, as animal or horse or 
man, finds application, the agreeing qualities, which in 
popular speech or in scientific terminology carry over the 
common noun from one object to another in its own class, 
are grouped under this notion of resemblance. As the 
initiative step in conceptions, classifications, generaliza- 
tions, is a fundamental fact in thought and language, this 
notion of resemblance is seen at once to be a most com- 
prehensive category. It covers much the larger share 
of judgments, as the subject and predicate are almost 
always united on the ground of a direct or implied agree- 
ment. In the proposition, John is a man, a direct resem- 
blance, as in all classifications, is the basis of the asser- 
tion. The proposition, John strikes, proceeds on the 
implied agreement between John's action and a general 
form of action termed striking. The same is true of all 
propositions that attribute states, acts, qualities. In so 
far, however, as any judgment involves another regulative 
idea, there is in it an element not to be referred to mere 
resemblance. John struck James, is a proposition which 
does more than define the kind of John's action. It gives 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 23 

the time of its putting forth, and this is a condition to be 
understood by itself, and not an agreement or a disagree- 
ment with something else. The same is true of all asser- 
tions which involve a distinct, intuitive idea, as, The action 
is right, The apple is, There are two apples. 

The mathematical and the logical mechanism of 
thought are given in these two notions of number and 
resemblance. Starting thus early in primary and univer- 
sally applicable categories, mathematics and logic bear 
sway everywhere, in every process by which the mind 
works up its material. Mathematics, resting primarily on 
number, renders the larger aid to the physical world; 
and logic, resting on identity, gives its chief assistance to 
the development of mental facts. 

Passing these three comprehensive ideas, the remaining 
categories lose something of their general character, and 
stand to each other in definite relations, sometimes of 
mutual exclusion. Space and consciousness define opposed 
phenomena, and shut them out from each other. Those 
facts which call for space, locality, in which to be realized, 
are physical ; those which are determined in intrinsic char- 
acter by consciousness are mental. These phenomena are 
at times most closely related, but never interpenetrate 
each other. 

A physical r act is always known in one way, by sen- - 
sation ; under one condition, that of location : a mental fact 
is known in another way, to wit, by virtue of its being a 
mental fact, to the mind whose it is ; and under another 
condition or form, that of consciousness. No matter how 
closely these two kinds of facts may skirt each other, there 
is no running of lines across, no triangulation from one to 
the other. There is still a misty demarcation which 
sunders all connections. Passing from one to the other, 
the mind is for an instant as it were, in syncope, and takes 



24 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

up the threads of knowledge again without being able to 
unite them to those just left. Sensation and consciousness 
report facts from opposite sides of the sphere of knowledge. 
Like eyes whose circles of vision never intersect each 
other, each has its own constructions. Nay, like eyes that 
see totally different things, each renders phenomena com- 
parable and apprehensible only among themselves. No 
two realms can be more diverse than these two,. since we 
drop down upon them by totally distinct avenues of ap- 
proach, totally distinct conditions. 

In accordance with this diversity of character is the 
difference of law, of connection, prevalent in each class 
of phenomena. Cause and effect is the controlling, uni- 
ting idea of physical facts, spontaneity of mental facts. A 
phenomenon that does not transcend in its line of con- 
nections our physical organism is one of necessary, caus- 
ative dependencies ; one that does strike upward into the 
activities of mind before it returns to the physical world is 
so far forth one of spontaneous force. The mind does not 
think by compulsion, feel, aside from sensation, by compul- 
sion, nor resolve by compulsion. Mathematical power is 
spontaneous, original power; a power evoked, not one 
coerced, by the presence of Euclid and a black-board. 
There are no realized, stored up, forces that must issue in 
such and so much thinking ; in feeling, fixed in kind and 
quantity. The physical changes that accompany thinking 
and feeling, the transfer of molecular forces, are explained 
by sufficient, purely physical results ; but neither these 
nor their methods of production suffice to include and 
explain the states of mind incident to them. The spon- 
taneity of mind is not lost because it gives rise to 
necessary sequences in the physical world. To talk of a 
thought-force as one in the circle of correlative forces is 
to forget that that circle is already complete. The chemi- 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 25 

cal, thermal changes of brain -tissue are exhaustive with- 
in themselves ; there is no chasm between them into 
which we can drop our thought-force, no known link 
among them which we can designate by this name. The 
highest form of this spontaneity is seen in choice, and 
hence this comprehensive idea, defining purely intellect- 
ual connections, is covered by the word liberty. There is 
no opportunity for liberty, freedom, unless there is intel- 
lectual spontaneity on which it can be grafted : as liberty 
is nothing but spontaneity put forth between alternative 
lines of action, unless there is true origination, there can 
be no liberty. 

But freedom, spontaneity, as it finds no necessary law 
within itself as a governing impulse, can companion only 
with intelligence, and thus find a law to yield to without itself 
in the conditions of its activity. Its causes must be final 
causes, that is motives in advance of it, not forces behind 
it. Accordingly we have the true, the good and the 
beautiful as objects of intellectual activity, giving rational 
purposes and a law of freedom to its life. A truth is the 
agreement between our conceptions, our judgments, and 
that to which they pertain. It is a modified form of the 
notion of resemblance, one by which we link together the 
intellectual and actual, as valid counterparts of each other. 
The right and the beautiful we accept as primitive guid- 
ing conceptions — the right before the beautiful, as the 
highest beauty embodies the right in its most perfect 
form. 

Time is the comprehensive idea by which the two 
series of events, physical and mental, are interwoven. 
They touch and condition each other constantly with no 
transfer of force that we can trace from either side. 
Indeed the word, force, though applied alike to the agen- 
cies which work physical and mental changes, seems to 
2 



26 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

express something quite diverse in the two cases. The 
force of a spring and the force of a thought are as distinct 
as two things well can be. These diverse lines of activity 
are merely netted together at identical points in time, at 
which they meet, but from which they ever depart into 
diverse realms above and below. 

A last regulative idea is that of the infinite, applicable 
to space and time, to potential being or power. The 
mind finds an occasion for this idea in the contemplation 
either of physical or spiritual facts. The infinite is to be 
carefully distinguished from the indefinite, the undefinably 
great. An infinite series in mathematics is one capable 
of indefinite expansion, but how far soever extended it 
remains finite in value. The physical creation is indefinitely 
large in reference to our apprehension of it, but is none 
the less finite and definite in itself. The power actually 
put forth by a being of infinite power is finite, since in 
the very exercise it receives realization, form, limitation. 
God is not exhausted by his works. 

We are now prepared to define what we understand 
by thought. This definition will make the sketch of 
the philosophy on which we are to proceed sufficiently 
extended for our present purposes. We can not defend 
its positions, having already done this, nor will the 
value of our later conclusions altogether depend on the 
exact acceptance of their philosophical premises. Thought 
is the office of the understanding. It works up the 
material offered by the senses under the comprehending 
ideas furnished by the reason so as to cause it to subserve 
the purposes of intelligence. The fact of being and the 
kind of being are recognized under the first three of the 
ideas now given. The inquiry how or where that being is 
to be found proceeds under the notions of consciousness 
and space ; its date under that of time, its law under 



A STATEMENT OF MENTAL POWERS. 27 

causation or under spontaneity and right. The limits of 
the being are denned by the idea of the infinite with its 
correlative the finite. 

These notions are, or should be, the exhaustive cate- 
gories of thought, and hence there is no judgment, no 
abstract or general term, that does not imply one or more 
of them. All the processes of thought necessarily pro- 
ceed under them. The material afforded by sensation can 
be in no way considered by the mind save as it brings a 
query, a suggestion, to it from one or other of its own 
rational, regulative notions. If it inquires concerning a 
thing, Is it? What is it? Where is it ? How came it 
to be ? To what purpose can it be put ? or of an event, 
When was it ? What was its origin ? What will be its 
issue ? these and like questions spring up under sug- 
gestions of its own, prompting the mind to institute them. 
Without these comprehensive ideas under which it is ever 
laboring in some concrete form to comprehend objects, to 
set them in order before its rational, contemplative power, 
the mind would remain quiescent under sensations, finding 
nothing that it could do with them beyond experiencing 
them. These, it is true, might, by instinctive nervous 
connections and by memory, assume an orderly operation 
on the animal organism ; but there would be involved in 
this no intellectual apprehension or handling of them. 
Thought, then, is the mind's comprehension of the phe- 
nomena given it in sensation and consciousness under its 
own regulative notions. 

The distinction between brute intelligence and human 
intelligence seems to us to lie just here. The brute is 
endowed with sensation, imagination, memory. Memory, 
impressed by the salient features of past experiences, com- 
bines variously and serviceably the material of sensation ; 
till the events of life, within the narrow range that fall to a 



28 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

brute, come to be spontaneously ordered with more or less 
adroitness. This work proceeds not thoughtfully, as in 
man, not by ideas and abstract conceptions, but by concrete 
experiences impressed upon the memory by pain and 
pleasure, and so thrown into permanent association. The 
dog, baffled and punished in one effort, and successful in 
another, has in each an item of indissoluble affinities, a 
concrete truth that acts with the quickness and certainty 
of a sensation, an automatic, organic connection, on each 
suitable occasion. These terms of intelligence in the mere 
brute are complemented by large instinctive endowments, 
among which we should put the instant, uneducated 
mastery of space relations, shown by the young of all 
animals. 

The intelligence, then, of animals is of this nature. 
Their sensations, their mental states, and their muscular 
efforts are united by appetites, by instinctive impulses, 
and by memoriter connections shaped by experience, and, 
within relatively narrow limits, act with great certainty 
and invariabieness. The intelligence of man, while dis- 
closing an under-current of action like that now attrib- 
uted to the brute, is characterized by taking up its sensa- 
tions, its experience, into the clear consciousness afforded 
it by the recognized presence of rational ideas, and 
there constructing them into well— defined judgments. 
The strictly rational element in the action of the brute 
seems to us to be involved not evolved ; with man it is 
evolved, and may be analytically discerned and expressed. 
Hence, in the one case, all education consists in the 
careful formation of fixed associations ; in the other, in 
assiduously breaking up these, and leading the mind to 
independent, constructive thought. 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 29 

CHAPTER II. 

The Being of Matter a?id of Mind. 

WE need to perform a little more preliminary work 
in indicating the grounds of belief in the real 
existence of matter and of mind. Neither matter nor mind 
is directly known ; certainly not if by direct knowledge 
is meant that given in consciousness, that which the 
mind has of its own states. Among these states are 
neither their external nor internal sources. We must 
be allowed, as a convenience of language, to use the word 
consciousness as designating the mind's knowledge of its 
own phenomena, though we deny the inference therefrom, 
that the mind, by an additional act, searches itself, and are 
aware that we thereby turn attention from the true relation 
of facts, much as we do in the current phrase, The sun 
moves. Direct knowledge is that which the mind has of 
its own states. But it will be said, that this definition begs 
the question, and that we assume to ourselves the entire 
ground when we say, that the mind has a necessary, immedi- 
ate apprehension of its own phenomena, and only a mediate 
knowledge of anything beyond them. Whatever may be 
the extension we shall give to the terms, direct knowledge, 
it is plain that the consciousness which belongs to the 
mind of its own states must remain its most immediate 
knowledge ; for there is here the intervention of no single 
power, but that inevitable cognition of mental facts by 
which alone they become facts. We shall first show, then, 
that the existence neither of mind nor of matter is a term 
or factor in consciousness. 

We arrive at matter and at mind as the permanent 
substrata of their respective phenomena in the same way. 



30 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. , 

The notion of causation impels the mind instantly to sup- 
ply a substratum as the ground or source of mental activ- 
ities. The idea of causation does not allow the mind to 
accept as ultimate and self-sufficient the film of phenomena, 
but compels it to put beneath this surface flow of percep- 
tions and feelings permanent streams of forces, of which 
these are the momentary expression. If the mind should, 
for an instant, omit this reference, all events would at once 
lose for it cohesion, and every thread of causal inquiry dis- 
appear. Causation includes the hidden force in and under 
each effect, making cause and effect the invisible and 
visible, the intangible and tangible, sides of the same thing. 
It thus involves the fixed succession both of superficial 
facts and underlying forces. The one notion covers both 
these points. The intuition 'that forbids my acceptance 
of phenomena without forces present to occasion them, 
also forbids the acceptance of either phenomena or forces 
in the present moment without corresponding facts in the 
previous moment to which they can be referred. In other 
words, the mind is held firm to the postulate of all 
scientific thought ; nothing stands alone, but is linked 
backward and forward in necessary dependencies. Each 
event is caused, and is, in turn, causal through an under- 
lying nexus of force. Thus when a fact of any sort is 
present, the mind demands with the vigor of its rational 
constitution, a vigor which supplies the activities of every 
hour and the inexhaustible energies of science, that that 
fact shall find explanation and rest in other facts. 

Thus with a movement, than which no mental action 
is more inevitable and certain, more immediate, automatic 
and positive, the mind puts beneath all phenomena an 
appropriate force as their permanent seat or source. This 
action is so spontaneous and instantaneous, that when it 
stands connected with sensation, we do not readily dis- 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 3 1 

tinguish it as a separate constituent. A well-known voice 
strikes the ear ; we immediately infer the approach of our 
friend, yet speak of his presence as a sensation, we 
heard him. This primary and omnipresent judgment of 
causation is more closely interlocked with all the states 
and activities of the mind than any other. Force, variable, 
invisible and undefinable as it is, is the pregnant, hourly 
conception of daily life and' of exact science. If the size 
and distance of visible objects are settled by judgments, 
which an inexact and variable experience has formed, yet 
so settled, that, in the case of our habitual estimates, we 
seem to have taken them in as parts of vision, it ought not 
to surprise us, that one uniform judgment, never departed 
from, that of real force underlying all phenomena, should 
be so inclosed in the sensation as not to be practically 
distinguished from it. 

Only careful analysis, or appearances of a doubtful 
character, ever separate in the mind's action sensations 
from the real being they habitually indicate. The thing 
and its manifestations cover and contain each other. 
Hence the notion of substantial being is primary, funda- 
mental to the mind, and rests for its validity on two 
activities, the activity of the mind in sensation or in 
thought, and its activity in referring the state or thought 
under its category of causation. 

There are two classes of facts, in a most general divis- 
ion, with which the mind has to deal, sensations and im- 
pressions. In sensations the mind perceives qualities only 
very partially subject to itself, qualities which have a 
peculiar definiteness, which persist with a power and, 
occasion being given, return with a precision, that com- 
pletely distinguish them from its other experiences, which 
we have termed impressions. Moreover, these sensations, 
or more properly the objects of them, admit of approach 



32 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

and confirmation in a variety of ways through different 
senses. Cross-lines are thus run whose intersections 
establish points. The mind's experience in these various 
senses, furnished as it is with the ideas of space and causa- 
tion to be called out on occasion, leads it to ascribe 
external existence to these fixed, defined sources of stable 
phenomena, phenomena determined for the senses in a 
character and order to which they can return at pleasure, 
but cannot alter. This external reference, spontaneously 
made, becomes constant, unwavering ; and is confirmed 
by every moment's experience. The mind does not in the 
outset ponder the reference, but with the certainty of 
sufficient powers makes it, and ever after confirms it. 

On the other hand, the mind's impressions, its experi- 
ences, other than those of sensation, assume so variable 
and relatively indistinct a form, so fluctuate with its own 
activity, so come and go at its own bid, so flicker about 
the firmer sensations that give rise to them, that the mind 
unhesitatingly refers them, with more or less play of free- 
dom, to itself. Thus the great division into mental and 
physical phenomena is made by the early, inevitable action 
of the intuitive and reflective faculties; first made as a 
practical discrimination, and more and more made as a 
division clearly, realized to the mind itself. With every 
event and every year it is impressed upon our experience, 
till it seems a part of our original, sensational being. It is 
a portion of our spontaneous being in the sense that 
rational powers must, in their unfolding, make it, and that 
with increasing distinctness and certainty. It is not true 
that there is at no time confusion in the adult mind at 
this point. In dreams we are at a loss to know whether 
the objects present to the imagination are real or unreal, 
and the question may be distinctly raised by us. In waking 
moments we fail at times to distinguish an impression 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 33 

which has floated into the mind from the recollections of 
facts with which it may be encompassed. Insanity is, in 
large part, the breaking down in some direction of this 
division, the subversion of the mind's action in separating 
sensations and impressions. 

There is one important fact in this reference of diverse 
phenomena to matter and to mind respectively. Though 
it is made in each instance under the idea of causation, in 
the first case we reach a physical force, and in the second 
an intellectual power. The physical force is definitely 
expressed in the effect, and must itself be referred to ante- 
cedent causes exactly commensurate with it. The rigid 
form which our physical experience assumes, gives to the 
mind the occasion for applying the notion of causation as 
an exact correspondence or equivalence between causes 
and effects, the transmission of force without alteration or 
loss. Thoughts and feelings have no such invariability, 
they are rather in constant fluctuation. Hence, though 
impelled to refer them, as results to an intellectual agent, 
we ascribe to that agent a spontaneous power, thus cutting 
the connection backward. We do not, as in physical 
events, trace thought as the expression of a transmitted 
force, through the mind, for a moment its medium, to some- 
thing beyond it, but are satisfied to find a final reference 
for it in spontaneous intellectual activity. What we term 
causes in the mental world, are either these intellectual 
powers, sufficient in themselves to secure variable pheno- 
mena ; or the occasions on which they are put forth. 
Thought as thought, is to be distinguished from its physi- 
cal conditions, from the series of close-bound organic 
changes which underlie and accompany it. Cerebral activ- 
ity is physical, and subject to physical law. The men- 
tal state of which it is a condition, stands in quite another 
relation to the intellectual powers whose product it is. 



34 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

The recognition of the continuity of causation in one 
class of facts, and of spontaneity i-n another closely affiliated 
class, we believe to arise from a mind so endowed with 
appropriate comprehensive ideas as to be able ultimately, 
first with spontaneous, and then more carefully with reflec- 
tive, insight, to analyze, classify and correctly construe all 
its experiences. It is not necessary to suppose that in the 
application of its intuitions, any more than in the use of 
its senses, the mind is absolutely, universally right. That 
it steadily approximates such correctness, and is aided in 
its approach by experience and reflection, are facts suffi- 
cient to prompt effort, and give a guarantee to its conclu- 
sions. If man must learn to see, to hear, to master his 
senses, why may he not learn the limits of his intuitions, 
and the grounds of their application ? As a fact we know 
that spontaneity has, in the past, constantly trespassed on 
the field of causation; that it has been inquiry that has 
served to determine the perpetuity and fixed equivalence 
of physical forces ; and that, on the other hand, under this 
momentum of investigation, causation is, in turn, displacing 
spontaneity and usurping the realm of mind. 

The universality and necessity which characterize cor- 
rect mental action, and which are said to belong to our in- 
tuitions, are proximate and slowly approached, not absolute 
and immediate. Some will refer a physical fact to a varia- 
ble, spontaneous cause, and others will ascribe variable 
mental acts to absolute, realized forces, and some will 
accept in either region, chance events. The idea of num- 
ber, even, is not, in its application, immediate and exact 
beyond those narrow limits in which the mind can hold 
the constituent units of a_sum or a product distinctly before 
it, and these limits are settled by cultivation. Three or 
five may, for a long period, be the numerical range of a 
tribe. The axioms of Geometry are the brief steps which 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 35 

the ordinary mind is, at the outset, able to take. Its long- 
est propositions are axioms to one able to grasp them in 
an instantaneous, comprehensive act, to stride over them in 
one undivided step. Certainty and correctness of use are 
the product of experience, even in our intuitions. They 
come to experience, arise under it, and submit themselves 
to its instruction, though originally beyond it. Skill in 
the handling of the mind waits on use, as truly as in the 
government of the body. 

The belief in matter and mind, each under its own 
characteristics, is one of the earliest which the intellect 
reaches by the interpretation of its sensations and impres- 
sions under its intuitions. Experience constantly deepens 
and more clearly defines this distinction, till, finally, it 
seems to us a piece of primitive, direct knowledge. Native 
powers and life-long drift stratify and bury these truths in 
the mental soil. 

We will now give the reasons why these facts of physi- 
cal and mental existence cannot be set down as direct 
knowledge, the products of consciousness; or, if we 
extend the terms, direct knowledge, to sensation, of sensa- 
tion. The " ego and the non-ego " are both inferentially, 
under the force of intuitions, involved in the states of con- 
sciousness ; neither of them are directly found there. To 
hold to a direct knowledge of matter, as a constituent of any 
act or state appearing in consciousness, is to break down 
the distinction between substance and phenomena. Physi- 
cal phenomena are the effects which arise in the interaction 
of substances or forces. Substance, force, is to the senses 
the unknown, the unknowable source of these effects. That 
anything is known to the senses, finds its entrance by them 
to consciousness, is proof of its phenomenal being, that it 
has arisen from the action of forces, and does not express 
their intrinsic nature. It is because of this distinction that 



36 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

we are ever referring appearances to the forms of being 
they indicate. Now if the mind can know matter as mat- 
ter in consciousness, it must know it aside from any phenom- 
enal manifestation, since phenomena, from the very con- 
ception of their nature, do not put us in direct possession, 
but only in inferential possession, of their sources. They 
would cease to be phenomena, if they became noumena. 
The distinction of substance and appearance would be lost, 
since the substance would be known as the appearance, 
and under the same conditions with it. The substance is 
thus no longer the hidden source of effects, but is found 
among them as one of them. This knowledge of matter 
as matter, aside from phenomena, must either be a knowl- 
edge of effects or of causes. It can not be a knowledge 
of effects, since effects are phenomenal. It is, then, a 
presence in our sensations of causes as causes. But if our 
sensations include causes, we have no farther occasion for 
a reference of these to unknown, material causes, and the 
state of mind called a sensation becomes complete, self- 
explanatory and final. The division into substance and 
phenomena, cause and effect, is lost, and both lapse into 
continuous, homogeneous, fluctuating states of mind, the 
data of consciousness. The sensation itself wraps up in its 
inner being both the cause and the effect, and, as a single, 
simple state, gives no opportunity for maintaining the dis- 
tinction between them. To know matter as a conscious 
ingredient in sensation, is to know causes ; to know phenom- 
enally causes is to break down the division between them 
and effects, since all that we can regard as effects, are these 
same sensations now known in whole or in part as causes. 
If this division is on these conditions to be restored, it 
must be by an effort to divide the sensation itself; and this, 
if it issued in any fruitful result, would be to restore again 
the sunken intuition and the unknown cause, as s:iven above. 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 37 

Either the complexity of the sensation is involved in its 
containing at once the cause and the effect, the substance 
and the phenomena, or the identity of these two con- 
stituents. If we accept these as identical, we lose the very 
framework of science and philosophy ; if we regard the 
sensation as complex, we go back to the secret intuitions 
which impart the complexity. 

A second kindred objection to an assertion of a direct 
knowledge in consciousness of the " ego and non-ego " is, 
that it confuses the office of consciousness by obliterating 
the difference between the mind and the mind's acts. 
Consciousness belongs to every mental act and state as its 
essential characteristic, that which lifts it into the intellectual 
world. It is the condition of light which pertains to it. Con- 
sciousness can not be made to disclose the very mind, un- 
less the mind is a mental act or state. Consciousness can 
reveal the mind, only on condition that the mind equals its 
own activities and nothing more. If we strive to hold fast 
to a distinction between the mind and its transient states, 
and yet insist that the mind directly knows itself, we shall 
be unable to refer that knowledge to consciousness alone. 
We must assert some sort of an inner eye with which it 
looks at itself, as valid being, and so gets an interior state 
to which, as a condition, consciousness can attach itself. 
There must be a central vision, a masterly oversight, by 
the mind of the parts of its own being ; for consciousness 
is not a power, but the disclosing light of a power. In 
order of thought, the mental activity goes before con- 
sciousness. 

But this comprehensive, supervisory, perceptive power 
is thus reduced to a simple activity of mind, and its results 
presented as only one of the states of mind. Conscious- 
ness, therefore, in disclosing it, can not disclose the mind 
itself, but only one of its phenomena. A direct knowl- 



38 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

edge of the mind by itself can not then be referred to 
consciousness, for this yields activities, states ; but if 
insisted on must be referred to some peculiar perceptive act 
whose object and subject are both the mind. The mind 
would thus be made to reflect itself, the eye to see itself. 
The knowing power would be hopelessly confounded by 
being compelled to stand at both ends of the knowing pro- 
cess, by being compounded of all its ingredients. To make, 
therefore, a direct appeal to consciousness for a knowl- 
edge by the mind of its own unphenomenal being, is 
to quite mistake the data yielded by consciousness, to wit, 
states of mind. Foundation work in philosophy is there- 
by confused and lost. 

A third objection to a direct knowledge of matter is, 
that it finds no support in ordinary language and experi- 
ence. This statement is quite the reverse of that made by 
Hamilton, but it seems to us clearly correct. Men doubt- 
less do believe that they have a knowledge of the material 
world in perception, but they make no such distinction 
between a direct and an inferential knowledge as that on 
which this discussion turns. All that is meant by the lan- 
guage of common life, I see the tree, I hear the bird, I 
smell the rose, is, that a knowledge of these external 
objects is immediately incident to perception, without the 
obvious intervention of reasoning. This we admit. The 
latent judgments involved in a perception, are rightfully 
wrapped up in it, and, as essential constituents, bear in 
language the same label. Men do not distinguish in 
speech between the direct and indirect elements of percep- 
tion, its germ and its completed from, when experience has 
crowded it full of every variety of inference. Familiar 
speech makes no analysis of the process, but refers a 
knowledge of external objects to it as one composite act. 
Every mind, however, easily discerns the enlarging element 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 39 

of experience enclosed in sensation, when not able per- 
fectly to separate the two. 

This objection can fairly be pushed farther ; direct per- 
ception of material objects contradicts experience. So 
obvious is it that in vision we do not directly perceive 
remote objects, that Hamilton is compelled to admit it. 
He says, '■ It has been curiously held, that in looking at 
the sun, moon, or any other object of sight, we are actually 
conscious of those distant objects. . . Nothing can be more 
absurd ; we perceive through no sense aught external, but 
what is in immediate relation and in immediate contact 
with the organ." * The implication of this passage is flatly 
against experience and the language in which it is ordinarily 
expressed. We are said to see the sun and the moon, the 
land and the rocks. It is of these that we are thought to 
gain a knowledge in perception, and of nothing else. 
Men do not suppose that they recognize directly the retina 
and the image on it, or any portion of the nervous mech- 
anism that mediates between mind and matter. They 
would be surprised to be told that they did. These facts, 
this method of vision, remain unknown to the most of 
men, and when learned have the fascination of novelty. 
The light in its nature and action, the eye in its functions, 
or in its simple, physical structure, are not known directly 
or indirectly in vision ; they remain secrets to be unlocked 
by science. What is known are the lakes, the islands and 
the trees. To ascribe the one knowledge to perception is 
as much a surprise as to deny to it the other. 

Nor are we any nearer this doctrine of direct percep- 
tion, if we turn to the sense of touch. If the appropriate 
irritation is secured anywhere along the line of nervous con- 
nection, it is instantly referred to the superficial extremity 
of the nerve, and the ordinary inference made as to its 
* Lectures, p. 357. 



40 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

origin. The sources of sensations of touch are not, aside 
from experience, accurately discriminated. Thus one can 
not at once cease to feel through an amputated limb, to such 
a degree does acquired knowledge overrule the existing fact. 
It seems a preposterous belief to be supported by an appeal 
to consciousness, " that we perceive the rays of light in 
relation to, and in contact with the retina ; " we do not 
necessarily so much as know whether there be any retina. 
It may well be doubted whether, aside from an experience 
in which light is constantly varying in intensity, we should 
even know of the existence of light, and of its connection 
with vision. Experience teaches us the dependence of 
air and sound ; and earlier, in a more direct way, that 
of light and vision. Do we also know directly the waves of 
motion which, in the ear, give rise to sound, propagating 
the impression through the auditory nerve ? 

To hold to a direct knowledge of the external object 
in vision, is more reasonable and more in accordance with 
ordinary experience than to claim a knowledge of " the 
bodily organism itself, or that part of the sensorium which 
is excited to action." # Of the first we have in perception 
an indirect cognition, of the second no cognition what- 
ever. 

If the sensational nucleus of perception is one of sub- 
stance and not of form, as Morell, a disciple of Hamilton 
on this point, claims, then should we have an absolute 
knowledge, not a variable and relative knowledge, of an 
external fact. He says, " Every notion we have of an ex- 
ternal object — as a house, a tree, or a flower — is com- 
pounded of two elements, a material and a formal. The 
matter is furnished by the direct sensational intuition of 
a concrete reality ; and this is perception ; the form is fur- 

* Porter's Human Intellect, p. 132. 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 41 

nished by the logical faculty." * If this were true, we ought 
to have an exact knowledge of the size and shape and 
position of the tree, since these are settled by the substance 
of the facts before us, and should be rendered by a knowl- 
edge of that substance. The substance appears and only 
appears under definite conditions of size and form, and 
how can we directly know this substance without involving 
in that knowledge a knowledge of its inseparable adjuncts? 
As a fact, however, we have a very wavering, uncertain 
apprehension of these primary qualities — so-called — of mat- 
ter, which in each particular case condition it to its own 
form of being. Our vacillating recognition of the, for the 
time being, essential conditions of the fact, goes to show, 
that we do not directly know it in definite substance, but 
through symbols of a changeable rendering. The shifting 
judgments of perception, and all the deceptions which can 
be played upon it by size, position, motion, arise from its 
inferential character. Form is not logically deducible from 
substance, but is precise and actual with it ; so would be its 
perception, if that perception started in substance. Im- 
pressions .interpreted by experience give changeable form, 
and this Protean form inlocks the unknown substance. 

It is to be observed, that under this fourth objection, 
we give all the range to the word, direct ', which any can 
wish to assign it, and still find the doctrine of direct per- 
ception untenable. The question with us has been, not 
merely whether consciousness, but whether perception 
furnishes, as a sensational nucleus, a knowledge of sub- 
stance. Yet the two queries are one ; for consciousness 
alters no knowledge, but simply conditions it to be knowl- 
edge in its own order. The discussion thus becomes, Is 
there any power, any activity, that directly cognizes, takes' 
to itself, matter as matter, so that in yielding its product 
* Philosophy of Religion, p. 45, 



42 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

in consciousness matter is there yielded ? The perceptive 
power, if any, must be that power; and this only renders 
mental phenomena attributable to external causes. For 
it to do more than this would be for it to give unphe- 
nomenal results, unconstructed, chaotic substance ; not 
the substance which underlies definite appearances, is 
believed in because of those appearances, and, as a force, 
is expressed and measured by them. Nor can we, failing 
in perception of a direct knowledge of real being, seek it 
in intuition. Intuitions yield ideas, not facts. 

A fifth objection to direct perception is, that it legiti- 
mately involves either idealism or materialism, or an 
ambiguous attitude between the two. If the mind knows 
mind directly, matter directly, and its own phenomena 
directly, in precisely the same' way, an easy inference is, 
that they are all of the same nature. If matter comes 
within consciousness, it loses its material characteristics, as 
much as would mind its distinctive qualities if it came 
within space. Hence idealism is a natural inference 
from the presence of matter as matter in consciousness 
side by side with its own states. But all the materialistic 
tendencies of modern philosophy are easily evolved from 
the same premises. The materialist may, like Spencer, 
decline to identify matter with mind, but, including all the 
facts of mind in sensations and their faintly echoed and 
necessarily concatenated impressions, make -the laws of 
these the underlying principles of mental facts. When 
the division between substance and phenomena is lost, 
and all phenomena are found upon one plane, ir is open 
to our philosophy to choose either idealism or materialism, 
or to hold itself in abeyance between the two. Practically 
it will reach the one or the other according as it searches 
for the laws of these homogeneous phenomena in sensa- 
tions, or in logical inferences ; in a certain stubborn ten- 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 43 

dency of the phenomena themselves, or in a certain fixed 
construction of them by the mind. 

Thus the identification of real and phenomenal being in 
perception, as both phenomenally present in it, plays into the 
very philosophies which, as a doctrine, it was brought for- 
ward to oppose. It turns attention from the true basis on 
which the dual existence of matter and mind can be made 
to rest, and furtively identifies in consciousness the two 
elements, substance and phenomena, cause and effect/ 
which are to be kept most sedulously apart, if we are to 
retain the fundamental distinctions of realism. It is as real 
being under diverse categories, that mind and matter stand 
forever apart ; their known phenomena are equally present, 
and only present, in the mind. 

The results of vivisection confirm the view we have 
urged. Those to which we refer are given by Taine in 
his work On Intelligence. It has been found that the 
nervous centres of even the higher senses are below the 
cerebrum ; that of hearing in the auricular protuberance 
and that of sight in the corpora quadrigemina. These 
portions of the encephalon remaining uninjured, though 
the cerebrum be entirely removed, reflex action can be 
secured through both the eye and the ear. Sight and 
sound still continue to affect the muscles. Yet the 
animal, so mutilated, has no knowledge of external objects, 
can not avoid obstacles in walking, and will not help 
itself to food. In these facts there is proof that a crude 
sensation gives no impression of the exterior world, till, 
the lower centre being put in connection with the cerebrum, 
it is wrought up by its action into a completed percep- 
tion. The knowledge of facts as facts belongs to the 
secondary, the cerebral, and not to the primary, the sen- 
sational, elements involved. 

We urge also as a reason which should lead us to 



44 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

scrutinize cautiously this doctrine, that it was used by 
Hamilton, decidedly against the general drift of philoso- 
phy, as a make-shift against the scepticism of his time. It 
bore, in the circumstances of its introduction, the appear- 
ance of a refuge from an unacceptable conclusion. More- 
over, it was made necessary, as a means of meeting 
unbelief, only because Hamilton did not, in his philosophy, 
attach to the notion of causation the authority that belongs 
to it. He regarded it not as a rational intuition, but as 
the result of the mind's weakness, its inability'to conceive 
the commencement of any thing. This foible of the mind 
is always, according to Hamilton, leading it to put back 
of each event a previous event to sustain it. 

The doctrine of direct perception, if it were correct, 
would give a basis, not by one tittle stronger than that 
found in perception, intuition and reflection conjointly, for 
the real being of the physical world. The powers of the 
mind stand or fall together, and no one of them can claim 
a constitutional superiority to another. Sensations easily 
usurp the field as against intuitions, but, in the court of 
reason, one faculty has no veracity beyond another as 
regards what each clearly affirms. A belief in the exist- 
ence of matter and mind is grounded, deeply and safely 
grounded, in the primitive, normal, concurrent action of 
our intellectual powers, those of the sense, the understand- 
ing, and the reason. The second unites the other two in 
reaching this primitive truth. There is no loss in this at 
once simple and complex action. A belief in matter and 
mind may as well rest on this triple basis as on sensa- 
tion alone. 

If the claims of Hamilton are just, that men, in a 
direct, simple, perceptive act, take knowledge of matter 
and mind, it is strange that any doubt should have arisen 
on the subject. A fact of consciousness, so universal and 



THE BEING OF MATTER AND OF MIND. 45 

patent as this, should never have been lost sight of; or 
if for a moment overlooked, should, on the redirection of 
the attention to it, have met with instant acceptance. The 
history of this discussion shows, that there is something 
more involved than a simple act of mind, a primitive fact 
of consciousness; that there is a subtile problem of 
mental analysis, and hence that a result — the generally 
admitted result of a belief in real being— due to one power 
or combination of powers, may easily be ascribed to 
another. If the knowledge of matter were a purely per- 
ceptive fact, and not one of obscure inferences, it would 
be the unmistakable, granular centre of every sensation, 
as much as that of color, or odor, or flavor, and conscious- 
ness would not fail to report it at the slightest suggestion. 
Men do not doubt, it is a doubt impossible even to phi- 
losophy, that a thought, a feeling, a vision are present to 
consciousness. On this theory real being, matter as 
matter, mind as mind, should, in the knowledge of men, 
stand with these clear, primary facts of our experience, 
facts that may receive a thousand explanations, but are 
never dimmed or lost sight of as phenomena. They lie 
low and firm, the solid ground of being, never quite hidden 
by the mists of speculation that spring from them. Such 
is the speculative basis for the real being of matter and 
mind, their practical basis is the undivided sentiment 
of men which is to be explained, not contradicted, by phi- 
losophy. Let philosophy cease to make its facts, and give 
its attention to those really present. 



46 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

CHAPTER III. 

The Being of God. 

THE fundamental fact in religion, outside of man's 
constitution, is that of the being of God. Morell's 
assertion is not far astray. "The germ of religion lies in 
feeling — the absolute feeling of dependence." * The object 
of this dependent trust is God. The necessary, unchang- 
ing point of spiritual contact between us and God, is this 
of complete dependence on him, alike for what we are and 
what we have. Our starting-points are given us by him, 
and our acquisitions are made under conditions which he 
establishes and sustains. Out of this unmistakable fact, 
if we believe in God, springs the entire circle of religious 
sentiment, and from this the outer circle of religious action. 
Our apprehension of his character in its relation to our own 
defines the precise feelings which he calls forth, whether 
those of delighted trust and love, of sweet repose and hope, 
and lively desire ; or of fear, repressed activity, and gloomy 
forebodings. Dependence ranges either way. It rises 
upward in buoyant reception, it strikes downward in sterile 
apprehension, it remains at rest in a sense of safety. God, 
by the magnitude of his being, annexes our life to his 
life ; the form and coloring of his life fill out and tint our 
existence. 

The initiatory truth of. a religious life is the being of 
God. The ability to establish this truth turns on the very- 
fact in the human constitution with which it correlates, our 
freedom, our moral being. Freedom and the ethical law 
involve each other. The law is an absurdity, a misappli- 

* Philosophy of Religion, p. 90. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 47 

cation of ideas, without the freedom which it properly ad- 
dresses, the powers that render fulfillment possible. The 
freedom, on the other hand, is given by the opportunity of 
choice, the true alternative to all adverse desires, the suffi- 
cient make-weight against sin, which the spiritual insight 
of the soul into its own, its law of life, imparts. One 
can choose between holiness and every form of grati- 
fication. There is between them a deep-seated diversity 
which precludes the reduction of the two considerations 
to one standard of pleasure, to a joint estimate of opposed 
enjoyments and a casting up of the balance between them, 
a calculation of advantages issuing in a line of interested 
action — action checked perchance for a moment by the 
complexity of circumstances, but never for an instant in- 
volving election. There is defeat or victory always in the 
ethical sense. It is present in each instance to win or to 
lose. It is not entangled as one factor among others, as a 
consideration blending its influence with other considera- 
tions, and sure to assert itself in the product according to 
its weight among complex causes ; it rests in poise over 
against all other motives, and offers a choice which can not 
be escaped, a parting of paths that cannot be overlooked. 
When pleasure is upon its side, that pleasure is thrust in 
the rear, and bid be silent. 

This liberty is the upshot of the moral nature ; and 
this liberty, this spontaneity exercised under the alterna- 
tive offered by the moral sense, is that in man's constitu- 
tion the knowledge of which brings home to him the proof 
of the being of God. Without this sense of freedom, 
deeply grounded in its own nature, the mind cannot be 
carried over to the recognition of an Infinite Being, the 
free, the independent source of all things. The initial idea 
is missing, or so obscured as to be inoperative. W r e wish 
to make this fact very plain in the present chapter, that 



40 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

religion is grounded in liberty, since its first truth, that of 
a Supreme Being, can be established only in connection 
with human freedom. 

If what so many are ready to affirm be true, "Either law 
or chance, these are the only alternatives," there is pos- 
sible no satisfactory evidence of a Divine Being, and relig- 
ion drops away. The writer from whom the above words 
are taken proceeds to say, " For the modern thinker there 
is no middle course. It is either symmetry or confusion, 
law or chance ; and between the two antagonist concep- 
tions there can be no compromise."* We would rather say, 
there are two forms of action, the one necessary, the other 
spontaneous ; chance is opposed to both of these, and, as 
a fact, has no existence, and no acceptance with the mind. 
A necessary action is one fixed in time, place, kind and 
degree by forces already in existence. All physical action 
is doubtless of this character, except as initiated by spon- 
taneous action. A spontaneous action is one which springs 
from power disclosed anew in it, power that had no pre- 
vious existence in any known product, power not actual but 
potential, power not transferred in strict correlation from 
product to product, but springing up afresh in each. All 
purely intellectual activities are of this sort. The power 
employed in running through a proposition is not identi- 
cal with that expended a little later in recalling an event, 
or in weeping over a sorrow. None of these states is con- 
tained as an expression of force in some previous state, from 
which it has come forth by strict transfer. The mind 
within limits, and under certain varieties of activity, is an 
independent, potential source of pow r er. The nervous 
changes which accompany this power, and restrict its exer- 
cise, express a parallel series of forces, among which 
doubtless there are exact actions and reactions, nicely ad- 

* Popular Science Monthly, Jan. No. 1873, p. 376. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 49 

justed effects and causes, yet a series that by no means 
determines the intellectual states concurrent with it, nor is, 
in any known way, their counterpart. The intellectual, 
spontaneous activity glides forward along the physical 
groove provided for it, and, in the friction of its progress, 
accepts the law of causation ; but, as intellectual strength, 
its putting forth is conditioned, by the presence of prior 
forces, neither in kind nor degree. We do not think by 
compulsion, thought is not incident to a shifting of forces, — 
though the reverse is true, and a shifting of forces is inci- 
dent to thought — nor can our thoughts, when once called 
forth, be set any other limits than those given by our 
spontaneous, mental power. The nature, direction and 
vigor of thought, are not settled by a destruction of brain- 
tissue, though a change of tissue accompanies each deter- 
mination by the mind of its own states. In other words, 
the mind, as immaterial essence, is sufficient to its own 
phenomena, as immaterial experiences ; and finds in each 
of its products a primitive expression and measure of its 
power. Power, in this sense, is strictly spiritual, belongs 
exclusively to mind, and differs widely from force. We 
interchange the words, and speak of the power of a lever, 
and of the force of a thought, only in a figurative way. 
There is what we call force, always lodged in, connected 
with, certain physical agents ; there is what we may call 
power, that issues afresh from the mind in every effort ; 
has no sensible, physical results ; but is able to take, in 
some unknown way, the initiative in the interplay of physi- 
cal forces, and so direct them. We must, in this discus- 
sion, discriminate sharply between thought as thought, and 
the cerebral activity that accompanies it. The one lies 
wholly on the mental, the other wholly on the physical, 
side of our being. We need also to watch carefully the 
words we transfer from the one set of facts to the other, 
3 



50 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

recognizing the necessity of a fundamental change in their 
significance. 

As the entire structure of religious faith rests on the 
idea of spontaneity as opposed to that of necessity, we 
need to draw with a firm hand the division line between 
them. Intellectual power is distinguished from physical 
force in its form of existence. Force is definite in quantity, 
is local, is always in one way or another in exercise, how- 
ever obscure and latent the form assumed, and hence is 
realized once for all, and equally at all times. The corre- 
lation of forces contains as a thesis these conclusions. 
Power within certain limits is irregular in quantity, has no 
local existence, and replaces itself under its several forms 
by unequal substitution, not by exact transfer. These are 
the conclusions contained in the belief in mind as poten- 
tial being. 

Force and power are also distinguished in the grounds 
of their exercise. Force, to the extent of its being, must 
be in exercise. It has in itself no possibility of increase, 
rest or diminution. Its visible effects depend on the other 
forces it encounters, but it is driven outward and onward 
by its own unalterable nature. Its whole movement is a 
push, it is always conditioned by antecedents definitely 
established in the past. These are at least the conceptions 
under which science shapes and studies forces. Power, 
modified also in its effects by the conditions under which 
it acts, is drawn forward rather than driven outward. The 
influences at work attract rather than impel it, seem to lie 
before it rather than to crowd upon it from behind. The 
motive has no realized, localized force which it can and 
must expend ; the inquiry, no included impulse by which it 
drives the mind through it. The mind, by its own desires, 
invests the objects of pursuit with their power, neither 
has the desire in turn any defined, physical fulcrum on 



THE BEING OF GOD. 



51 



which to rest its lever. It is not an appetite, but is 
incited by some intellectual vision, a conception which the 
mind has shaped of a good and its means of fruition. 
Neither is the' vision necessarily a product realized in and 
for the mind by fixed antecedents. It has sprung more 
or less spontaneously from its own restless yearning im- 
pulses ; from the kindling fancies which mark the mind as 
a generative, independent power ; from hopes that quite 
transcend its experiences, and struggle with that experience 
as something to be wrestled down. How often does the 
spirit shape a glowing image, tint and retint it each day in 
the face of gloomy, stubborn facts, and put forth constantly 
renewed effort for its realization ! The activity of intellect 
is begotten under an interplay of its own powers to which 
external facts assign conditions, but which they fail to 
define with anything like causal force. From these two 
distinctions, that power lacks definite being till the instant 
of its putting forth ; and that it is drawn into activity by 
its conditions, not driven into it, united to its impulses as 
motives by super-sensible, intangible connections, there 
follow other distinctions. 

There are to the powers of mind, whether of thought, 
emotion or volition, no exact lines. They do not as forces 
in each instance reach defined bounds which they can 
neither fall short of nor exceed. It is not easy in any 
instance to carry them to a point which can not be passed, 
while all grades of exertion lower than this lie open to 
them. They present the appearance of irregular action, 
graded by a variable spontaneity, responsive to external 
conditions, but not inclosed in them. The fixedness, the 
exact proportion and equivalence of physical forces are 
lost. The power has its range, its direction, given in 
itself, but within this constitutional, potential limit, plays 
with fluctuating efficiency. These fluctuations find more 



52 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

or less light cast on them by the external conditions of 
action, but these conditions only evoke a power and do 
not supply a force, give an occasion but do not meet it or 
unlock physical efficiencies that must meet it. This cer- 
tainly is the first appearance of the facts of mind and their 
common spontaneous interpretation ; they must hold their 
ground, therefore, till overthrown by full and explicit 
proof. Hence the explanations of rational action rise above 
the category of causation, and fall into that of incitement, 
persuasion. 

This variable efficiency of powers removes the possi- 
bility of prediction from their action in any absolute form. 
If we contemplate the conditions under which the powers of 
an individual are called into activity, we can form only an 
uncertain judgment of what his precise character and grade 
of efficiency will be, and this uncertainty increases as the 
intellectual and moral elements in him gain ground. Nor 
is there sufficient reason to suppose that this is due to our 
very partial knowledge of the genetic conditions and con- 
ditions of environment in each case operative. We are 
getting no arithmetical hold of individual life ; our calcu- 
lations take effect only in reference to numbers sufficiently 
large to eliminate personal variety or power under an 
average of chances. Though we can approximate the 
number of crimes that will be committed in a given com- 
munity in a given period, we can not predict who shall 
commit them. We have escaped the personal factors in the 
one equation and not in the other; and hence the first 
admits of a solution that does not belong to the second. 

Shakespeare, Bacon, Newton present an individual ele- 
ment which nothing in their parentage or nationality or 
locality serves to explain. Why each expended his power 
in a given way, may in part be made clear, but the source 
of those original gifts is inscrutable. The word, gifts, indi- 



THE BEING OF GOD. 53 

cates this. Genius in any form is not a product to be 
compounded by the most subtile organic or social chem- 
istry. This assertion does not deny a genetic dependence, 
but only a complete and exhaustive one. The proper name, 
Milton or Goethe, remains forever the final designation of 
an underived, unweighed combination of powers. Some- 
thing of the same uncertainty attaches to an effort to cal- 
culate the exact exertions which any person will put forth 
under given circumstances. The results in any one case 
easily transcend or easily fall below our estimate, shaped 
though it may be by a long observation of the complex 
powers under consideration. We are again thrown back 
on a doctrine of averages, which is simply an elimination 
of variable elements. In any other method a personal, inap- 
proachable residuum of purely subjective states is present to 
disappoint our expectation. We are taught that a power 
is not graduated to fixed results, is not present in arithme- 
tical ratios. That a calculation of chances is a constant 
accompaniment of social philosophy, is a disclosure of a 
pervasive potentiality. The necessitarian, far from prid- 
ing himself on these results, should see in them a confes- 
sion of his weakness. 

From this peculiar nature of power, which we express 
by the word potential, — whose very existence is an indica- 
tion of the validity of the idea which lies back of it — it 
follows that the reference of a product to a power is in a 
measure final. We trace effects from one cause to another 
in perpetual assent ; we refer rational acts to rational 
agents and so arrest the explanation in its regress. If we 
wish to make it any more complete, we do it by giving the 
environment of motives. Hitting again, in these physical 
conditions, the trails of causes, we may pursue them in 
various directions. Such inquiries may cast light on the 
circumstances under which the personal power was called 



54 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

forth, but it, in its spontaneity, remains the central fact to 
which all influences converge, at which they diverge, redi- 
rected in a primary, independent way. 

Force, as perfectly and exactly realized in all its transi- 
tions, must have a locality, sets of phenomena which are 
each moment its expression. Hence force is exclusively 
physical, working by fixed products, in which it is resting 
or through which it is passing. Power, on the other hand, 
is purely spiritual, pervades no locality with its self-exist- 
ent facts, and starts them from no local germs of force, 
but establishes them only under that evanescent, changea- 
ble type of being we term consciousness. When power 
combines itself with force, thought with action, the one 
yields the entire substance of the product, the other its 
form — the shaping idea whose presence we can discern, 
but whose method of efficiency is a mystery. There are 
many midway blended facts in which force and power 
meet and obscure each other, but in wide and close obser- 
vation the two elements are not easily lost sight of. 

Power or spontaneity is, according to this conception, 
in reference to physical forces, acting in a fixed determinate 
method ; and in reference to chance-action, spasmodic 
action, without antecedents or fixed limits or continuous 
development, a third thing. It stands with force as pro- 
ductive of order — though order of its own kind — and 
opposed to chance, which is a universal negation of order. 
The question is resolved into this one inquiry, Is there 
in mind potentiality, power that is not realized, but may be 
any moment realized within a certain circle of experiences ; 
power, therefore, that is a variable factor in reference to 
the being who puts it forth, power of which that being is 
neither the precise embodiment or the transient medium 
but the independent source ? We answer this question in 



THE BEING OF GOD. 55 

the affirmative for many reasons, which we can only briefly 
enumerate. 

Such spontaneity or power must underlie intellectual 
activity. A connection of thought is one discerned, nof 
one compelled ; one that is understood as a subjective 
attitude of the mind toward a subjective conception. If 
comprehension is a real, genuine act, it is comprehension ; 
that is, an activity elicited in the mind by purely spiritual, 
intellectual considerations. To induce such an act by phys- 
ical forces that lie back of it, is to destroy its character. 

Spontaneity must also underlie intellectual activity, if 
we are to have any stock into which to graft liberty, any 
ability, when an alternative is offered, to accept the one 
branch or the other. A power centered in itself, going 
out of itself, and that according to no external, necessary 
law, is the condition of liberty. But liberty is universally 
ascribed to man, and the actions that fall to it claimed of 
him. The moral law, government, society, and individual 
character rest upon it, in fact the order and beauty of the 
entire spiritual world, as a spiritual product. It is involved, 
moreover, in the immaterial, insensible quality of motives. 
They have no force, no physical connections, by which to 
make themselves efficient ; nor can they, in their intellect- 
ual form, be shown to address any local seats of appetite 
from which such an efficiency can be gathered. 

Again, the power of thought or of volition, when put 
forth, is not a realized, physical force. Whether it shall 
touch such forces and guide them, depends on external 
conditions, and nervous conditions, which are no part of 
the mind's constitution, necessary as they are to its effect- 
ive action. 

The growth of mental powers confirms this opinion. 
They are open to indefinite increase, and that, too, under 
circumstances which put at their disposal no new physical 



56 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

resources, but rather straiten those in possession. The 
growth of the mind passes quite beyond that of the body, 
and often continues during a decline of its forces. Physi- 
cal strength decreases, the appetites give way, the senses 
are dimmed, still the mind, and above all the moral nature, 
embarrassed indeed by the falling off of these their servants, 
hold on their way with more depth of insight, more breadth 
of conclusion, more charity of sentiment. 

Language is full of this idea of potentiality, history 
is full of it, daily life is full of it. The might-could-would- 
and-should, the may-can-and-must of our existence, 
present and approaching, are the larger share of it. 
We even reflect this potentiality, which belongs exclusively 
to ourselves, into the external world, when we say of some 
anticipated time, It may rain. No, there is in nature' no 
potency for two results. It certainly will or will not rain. 
We bring the statement as a possibility, a wavering fact, 
before our minds only as a familiar rendering of our own 
potencies. We find the doubt, which lies alone in the 
action of our minds, a stimulus to collect all the grounds 
of a prediction, a prevision ; to stretch our powers up, if 
possible, to the limit of insight. Failing of this, we 
accept the uncertainty, and provide for a contingency. If 
our knowledge were an exact product not to be extended, 
and our preparation its precise equivalent, following by 
necessity from it, lacking potentiality, destitute of possi- 
bilities either of excess or deficiency, we should cease to 
reflect our uncertainty of knowledge on physical events, 
and move on with them in the quiet of a fixed experience. 

Nothing can eliminate this potentiality, and reduce 
rational life to the staid certainty of physical forces, save 
a philosophy of religion which overtakes as a blight a few 
minds within a limited circle of opinions and experiences. 
No one ever thinks, speaks or acts, can think, speak or 



THE BEING OF GOD. 57 

act, in perfect consistency with the doctrine of fatalism. 
We would give this principle of spontaneity, so incorporate 
in the mind that we can not escape its practical recogni- 
tion, its true position, its real limits, as against that other 
idea, causation, equally but not more persistent. It is 
not strange that one who decries causation should also 
reject spontaneity, for they are both referable to the same 
intuitive action ; but it is most manifestly partial and 
inconsistent to accept the one, and ground universal law 
upon it, and to exclude' the other, its compeer in origin 
and office. We can not reject one uniform impulse of the 
mind while we give way to another ; nor leave these im- 
pulses to destroy each other. 

Do spontaneity and liberty, its fullest manifestation, 
exclude order and hence social science ? These ideas 
modify science in its application to society, as we constantly 
experience, but do not thrust it out. We would substitute 
for social science and the science of history, social phi- 
losophy and the philosophy of history, as indicating the 
new and less determinate powers with which we have here 
to deal. A knowledge of mind and of those activities which 
are shaped by it is philosophy rather than science. W T e 
are not studying fixed forces, nor tracing their necessary 
lines of action and reaction. We are inquiring into spon- 
taneous powers, and fixing the limits and conditions of 
their exertion. Here are order and law, but law and order 
modified by the subject-matter dealt with. Here is honest 
induction, for it takes the facts for what they purport to 
be, and marshals them in that line. 

A mental power is conditioned or restrained in two 
ways, but in neither of them with absolute bounds. Its 
general form and quality as a power are assigned it in the 
original constitution of the mind. Neither thought nor 
emotion nor volition can become something other than 
3* 



5*> A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

itself; nor can in all degrees transcend its wonted lim- 
its. The mind is restricted to these endowments with 
variable strength. The limitation is not complete, because 
each faculty lies potentially in the mind, and the actual 
thought, emotion or volition, in any given instance, is refer- 
able to that potency. It has sprung anew into being, and 
was not conditioned in its presence, form, degree, by pre- 
vious realized forces, which must needs find expression in 
it. A spontaneity, a potentiality, attended it on its very 
birth, and went with it in its every manifestation. 

A mental power is also conditioned to the occasions 
which evoke it. It can not create these, nor immediately 
modify them. These occasions are complex, and open vari- 
ous paths. Any of these themind may enter. Of divergent 
and redivergent ways, it may select as it will, but one or 
other of them must engage its activities. In choice, — the 
fullest exercise of spontaneity, the point at which it passes 
into liberty — the alternative is furnished the mind by 
external conditions, and, within the limits granted under 
the selection offered, restricts it completely. We can only 
take one or other of the things open to our election. 

It may be thought that this notion of spontaneity blurs 
the definition of liberty. Liberty can not exist without 
spontaneity to underlie it, and minister to it. If there is 
no power of origination, then the alternative involved in 
choice is delusive, and the mind, already subject to fixed 
forces, is conditioned to one result, though to which of the 
two is for the moment hidden. If choice can not avail 
itself of the spontaneity included in thought, emotion, 
it has no method of executing its purpose. Spontaneity 
differs from liberty only in going forth under a single 
sufficient impulse instead of standing between two incom- 
parable, uncombinable impulses, and deciding between 
them. Choice must be grounded in the general power of the 



THE BEING OF GOD. 59 

mind, or it would stand as an isolated, impotent form of 
activity, without fellowship with the mental faculties, or 
power to control them. These would then hold on their 
predetermined way in spite of one erratic spontaneous act. 
The spontaneity expressed in choice must be able to lay 
hold of and direct the spontaneity which runs through the 
entire intellectual life. Without spontaneity in execution 
in the parallel lines of thought, feeling and volition, free- 
dom in choice would be utterly barren. The fixed forces 
of thought would take up their own issues, and flow on 
beyond the reach of volition ; as do the laws of nature. 

Liberty gives room for philosophy if not for science, 
a philosophy which shall trace the rise and progress of 
history without interlocking its events with the iron 
grapple of a physical sequence. Given minds, men of 
defined characters, are manageable and in a measure cal- 
culable elements, though they carry reserved powers, and 
reserved principles of action. When we deal with men 
as contrasted with things, we have occasion for new and 
more flexible forms of proof, yet a proof which furnishes 
sufficient guidance, and puts in our hands practical power. 
Always, when we leave the domain of pure ideas, we lose 
demonstration ; yet make for ourselves a feasible way by 
probable evidence. In the case of matter, we may arrive 
at so exact a knowledge of its properties as to approximate 
certainty in our conclusions, even when dealing with 
specific facts. In the case of man, a wider experience 
brings less safety to our judgments, yet so defines the 
range of liberty as to yield us principles of action, and 
establish a philosophy of life. What this philosophy lacks 
in fixedness, it more than makes up in elevation ; in the 
germs of possibilities which it holds, and the grounds of 
influence which it offers. We may grow into society, 
grow with it, forecast for it a career, because its life like 



60 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

our own life is full of potentialities, the spores of spon- 
taneous powers floating in the intellectual atmosphere as 
the seeds of new developments. To work with these 
limited unlimited powers, these defined yet free impulses, 
is philosophy, a philosophy that by so much transcends 
science as it differs from it. If it forfeits the dead certainty 
of mathematical formulae, of iron and of adamant, it puts 
in their place a noble vision of things that may be. 

We are now to trace the dependence of the proof of the 
being of God on this conception of spontaneous power in 
man. The a priori argument is so unsatisfactory, and so 
lightly held, that we may pass it at once. It infers the 
actual being and eternity of God from the ideal necessity 
of eternal being to the conception of infinite attributes. 
It thus accepts a connection of ideas as a proof of facts. 

A second argument is that from effects to causes, 
from causes to a First Cause. This is sometimes called 
the cosmological argument, the argument from the universe 
to its First Cause. Every thing in this argument depends 
on our definition of a cause, on the source whence our 
underlying analogies are derived, from man or from 
matter. If our conception is that of physical causation, 
as it is likely to be, and as the force of language urges it to 
be, then our proof must entirely fail of its conclusion. The 
reason why this argument has so long met with acceptance 
is, because of its ambiguity, because the words, cause, First 
Cause, have covered a vague, expansive notion, inclusive 
of intellectual power as well as physical force. If we 
bring causation strictly down to its own physical type, 
if we define it in the light of material facts, it is obviously 
unable to furnish any connection, any transition, by which 
we can pass over to an infinite or primitive or personal 
being. The difficulty is this. An effect immediately con- 
tains, precisely measures, fully expresses, a cause. This 



THE BEING OF GOD. 6 1 

is the law of physical causation. If, therefore, we reason 
from the universe now existent to a cause or causes as 
contained in it or implied by it, that cause can not, by the 
slightest fraction, transcend the effect, the universe itself. 
If we were to allow the cause to overstep the effect, we 
should do it to the overthrow of the very conception of 
causation, the conception which sustains our argument, 
and carries it to its conclusion. By this action we can 
indeed reach a second, a third, a fourth point or era or 
epoch or aeon in time, each holding intact the cosmos 
with all its forces, but we can not, in any one of them, 
find the least addition to these forces, any thing that at all 
transcends the final product, that has not once contained 
it and is not now contained by it. If we were to make 
such a discovery, it would be in subversion of our premises, 
our cardinal axiom, the negation of our every connection, 
something starting up outside our causal law. Under caus- 
ation the last product is, in some sense, the greatest, since 
evolution, combination have made visible the order from 
the beginning hidden in its forces. In passing backward, 
we gain nothing in the volume of facts, in their visible 
glory we lose much at every step. This is the first diffi- 
culty. The cause, the First Cause, if we so choose to 
call it, interpreted by physical facts can not transcend the 
effect. The universe forever lies back of the universe. A 
change of form is admissible, but only under an absolute 
and eternal equivalence of force. The river can flow on, 
it can neither increase nor decrease, nor be found some- 
thing at any point other than it has been at every point. 

The second difficulty is like the first. There can be 
no First Cause, such as the argument calls for. The 
cause proximate to the effect under discussion is the im- 
mediate cause, and this considered simply as a cause, 
demands a second cause, this second a third, and this third 



62 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

a fourth. To arrest this movement at a thousandth, a ten 
thousandth, cause, and pronounce this a First Cause, is 
either to allow the furtive entrance of a new idea, alien to 
the argument, or to destroy the proof by which we have 
gone thus far, to strike out the steps by which we have 
climbed thus high. If any one cause requires a second to 
sustain it, every subsequent cause institutes a like claim, 
as we are dealing with a simple, invariable, primitive con- 
ception. If any cause at any point, no matter how remote, 
can dispense with a causal dependence back of it, then of 
right does every cause near and remote fall apart, and the 
rope we have moulded in the sand dissolves away. The 
First Cause of this cosmological argument is something 
very different from every other cause with which it deals, 
and is, to that degree, something begged or borrowed or 
stolen from we know not where. What the fact of causa- 
tion, considered alone, proves, is, that there is no beginning, 
no increase backward or forward, no bird's eye view to be 
had of the stream that floats us on ; that there are no 
fountains whence it issues, no ocean whither it flows, but 
an endless rolling onward more or less rapid, a perpetual, 
untiring evolution. 

Some philosophers have rightly, under this idea, striven 
by hypothesis to bend the flowing stream into a circle, and 
map the weary circuit by which it returns into itself. This 
theory yields the happy alternative of rest that the mind 
seeks for ! Under the notion of simple causation, forces 
flow into themselves, swallow up and renew their own 
work. If we can find no indication of this, we must look 
forward to a final dead-lock, when the universe shall have 
run down, have burned out its fires, and extinguished its 
tapers, and gone to rest in the darkness and forgetfulness 
of an endless night, a winter's night, half the forces fled as 
radiated heat, and half at a tense push and pull in death- 



THE BEING OF GOD. 6$ 

like equilibrium. Causation can only deal conjecturally 
with beginnings and endings, or rather it can allow neither, 
and is best satisfied when it bends round the two till they 
meet and cancel each other, and the universe as a whole 
falls into a measured orbit, an exhaustless rhythm of change. 
All that causation can put back of change is further change, 
all with which it can surround present being is past and 
future being, on either hand conditioned to it. If the 
current of its events is at any time checked, it is simply 
held fast in a gripe of force, as a river arrested by freez- 
ing. Nothing is annihilated, though little comes of the 
intense and sluggish strain of balanced forces. 

A third argument for the being of God, is derived from 
the adjustments of means to ends, the marks of intelligence 
which the world presents. It is the teleological argument. 
The forms of matter in quality and quantity are so fitted 
one to another, so unite in an orderly and beautiful cosmi- 
cal structure, are bound by an interplay of properties into 
such wise and complete laws ; the life that springs up under 
these laws is so sheltered by them, so conformed to them 
by organic constitution, by instinct, by incipient and devel- 
oped intellect, as to disclose, in the fullest possible way 
the insight, oversight, and constant direction of mind. 
The world is full of that kind of order which denotes intel- 
ligence, and from this the argument proceeds to infer a 
supreme, intelligent architect. We have no criticism to 
pass on the transition in proof, from a product apparently 
permeated with thought to an intelligent agent. This proof, 
however, calls for a more careful inquiry into what is in- 
volved in intelligence ; as to what form of being is suffi- 
cient to satisfy the words, An Intelligent Creator, 

This argument rests for its analogical support, and for 
the interpretation of its language, on the intellectual char- 
acter of man, and the relation of his works to him. We 



64 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

reason from implements of war, from ruined cities, to the 
existence of a race of men who shaped the one or built the 
other. Certain adjustments of means to ends bespeak the 
presence of man, and establish his agency. But what is 
the intelligence whose existence is thus proved? We 
must go to our analysis of human powers for our answer to 
this question. What man is, that intelligence is. If we 
rank him with physical forces, if we condition him like 
them to the circumstances which accompany action, if he 
is only the highest and most subtile of the combinations 
evolved in evolution, or, if you will, of the forces added in 
cosmical growth, then a product that discloses intelligence 
can carry us no higher than this our sole type of spiritual 
life, our defining term in the argument. Man's works lead 
us to man because they disclose that peculiar combination 
of means and ends which belongs to him. We reason from 
that which we term intelligence in the product to that 
which we have known as intelligence in the agent. But if 
we have decided that that intelligent agent whose relation 
to his works suggests and sustains our proof is strictly a 
necessary and physical knot of causes, in each and all his 
kinds of activity ; that he is simply the highest, that is the 
most complex, term that nature has reached ; and that, in 
spite of his own fancies to the contrary, he is wrapped up, 
body and mind, with the system of which he is a part, when 
we construct this our philosophy, we must be willing to 
accept its results. Consciousness, the play of mental phe- 
nomena, give to the necessitarian no arrest or modification 
of pure causal connections ; no more than the shadows in 
a stream alter the nature of the stream, or affect its phys- 
ical conditions. Hence nature is not by one iota tran- 
scended by intelligence, by the high-stepping reason con- 
ceded to man, and which is now to be made the basis of 
our proof of the being of God. Without spontaneity we 



THE BEING OF GOD. 65 

are no better off when dealing with the world as orderly, 
complete, beautiful, than when we regarded it as a mere 
series of events, a combination of effects. The intelligence 
out of which beauty and order spring, has been defined as 
itself a cause in its essential nature, has been included by 
its law of receiving and transferring influence with other 
causes, and is no more able, therefore, than the simplest 
among them, to transcend its physical connections, or to 
become a point at which we may pass to a Supreme Being 
above this interlocked, self-sufficient, unbroken existence. 
We are reasoning from a wise and thoughtful product to 
an intelligent agent, but an intelligent agent is, according 
to our present philosophy, one more complex centre of 
forces, one more transition term in the meeting and parting 
of causes. The light of consciousness, it is true, plays 
about these wonderful foci of fire, but it modifies nothing. 
It is only ambient flame incident to unusually high, varied, 
concentrated activity. 

We grant then, freely, that an Intelligent Creator is 
shown to be the source of a fitly devised creation. Let 
the theologian be satisfied with the formal features of his 
argument, and gather up its results as verbally sufficient 
for his purposes. If, however, we are told that these 
results reach to the extent of a free, personal, infinite Intel- 
ligence, known as God, we must at once demur ; such a 
conclusion flagrantly transcends the premises. These rec- 
ognized intelligence as a necessary force, at one with phys- 
ical forces in the law of its generation and action ; in place 
of this there is now put spontaneity, a conception, under 
the philosophy so far accepted, utterly unknown to us, and 
never admitted by us, though its presence was inferred 
from no matter what display of thought and volition. We 
grant the existence of an Intelligent Being, but of one 
that is intelligent according to known standards, not one 



66 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

that is separated from intelligence, as hitherto defined, by 
the whole diameter of his being. 

Intelligence belongs to the brute ; its action is full of 
it. Nor is that portion which is unconscious and organic 
any less full than that which is attended with conscious- 
ness. The same is true of man. His voluntary action - 
has less wisdom in it, less complete fitness, than his invol- 
untary action. Yes, it may be said, and this is the reason 
why we seek an ulterior reference of the wisdom of organi- 
zation and instinct in man and the animal to a superior, 
creative, conscious Intelligence. Yet why should you do 
this, if after all you gather the conscious and the uncon- 
scious actions of men, their organic and their intellectual 
activities, under one law, and make them both necessary? 
On that supposition, one of these forms of action is not 
essentially different from the other ; man is equally and 
only a medium in both; in both he sinks to the level of 
the stream, and is a part of it. If we refuse to refer a 
thought, a purpose, to man as ultimate, but simply look on 
them as the products of his native forces and conditions, 
then we have no motive and no reason on which to refer 
all- wise action, in a final way, to an All- wise Being. We 
can not so lift ourselves bodily above our premises. What 
man is, that God must be. Here are wise actions ; they 
purport to be those of man. We decline to acknowledge 
them to be his in any deep, final form. W T e put them in 
origin back into the physical universe again. We deny 
that there is in him spontaneity ; we take up his actions 
afresh, and trace them to the causes and conditions which 
have evolved them and him alike. Refusing to allow 
him to explain the world, we insist that the world shall 
explain him. We submerge him in matter once more, and 
so are satisfied. We can do no better by God when he 
shall come to us under the like image. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 67 

Under this philosophy there is no distinction between 
an organic and a voluntary act as regards their relation to 
existing forces. Both are accounted for in the same way, 
both are transitional states, changeable mediums in the 
interplay of activities. Hence, when we gather up the 
order of the world, and refer it to a Supreme Agent, that 
Agent can be to it only in turn a transitional medium ; 
and we ought to be equally satisfied if he is this in a con- 
scious or an unconscious way, in an organic or a volun- 
tary form. Man is the key of our system, his powers 
the type of our argument, and in him we have learned 
to identify voluntary and involuntary action, physical force 
and intellectual power. What kind, then, of an intelligent 
being emerges under this teleological proof, when guided 
by the philosophy of necessity ? We think, most philo- 
sophically the universe itself, as an organic, conscious, 
unconscious being. If we were to put any second being 
back of it as a Creator, whose intelligence was of the order 
now fixed upon as belonging to mind, as explaining mind, 
this ulterior being must himself be locked up in new 
causal connections of some sort, must wait as an anomaly 
outside the universe till the net-work of forces is cast 
over him ; and far from bringing light to the problem of 
being, must himself be the chief difficulty in it. He 
could only be a second unwieldy quantity, added to quan- 
tities only too unwieldy already, something in kind and 
make-up like that of which we now have more than we 
can explain — an elephant under our earth with nothing 
whereon to be planted. We suppose, in these objections, 
the necessitarian to be consistent with himself, and not to 
have one philosophy for human, and quite another for 
divine, intelligence ; not to quietly accede to spontaneity 
here, when he has so staunchly denied it there. 

Much better than this is it to say of the universe, that 



68 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

it itself is organic, that it reaches consciousness in man, 
that our God is identical with the forces and the laws 
everywhere working in and by him, even as man is the 
sum of the transitional forces which he contains and 
expresses. Thus our Deity is at one with the intelligence 
we have recognized, at one with the intelligence whose- 
existence is to be explained, and becomes the appropriate 
inclusive term for those causal agents, into whose keeping 
we have committed all things. Logically, under the teleo- 
logical proof, we can reach nothing higher than this, unless 
we reconstruct our argument, restore spontaneity, and so 
attain a power above physical forces. The whole out- 
ward aspect of the universe comes in to strengthen the 
pantheist — made so by the doctrine of necessity — in his 
conclusions. The wisdom of God runs as it were in the 
grooves of law, of those instinctive, necessary tendencies 
which express organic and unconscious, as opposed to 
what we call voluntary, action. The wisdom and power 
of God seem to be lodged as a germinant centre or centres 
in the cosmos itself. There is little indeed which can be 
addressed to the senses merely that is suggestive of con- 
scious, external, spiritual oversight and intervention. 

This teleological argument breaks down, not because it 
does not reach intelligence, but because it has already 
debased intelligence, included it among necessary forces, 
put it in strict 'dependence on previous, blind agents, 
rendered its connection with consciousness a secondary 
feature, and so throughout unfitted it to afford a true 
beginning. The beaver is intelligent, his action is intel- 
ligent, whether the fruit of device or instinct or organic 
adaptation ; for each of the three phases are alike forms 
of coherent, irresistible forces. The degrees in which 
they strike up into consciousness are quite secondary 



THE BEING OF GOD. 69 

considerations, since consciousness is a light incidental 
to activity, not one that determines it to a new form. 

A fourth argument for the being of God is derived 
from man's moral nature. It is the ethico-logical argument. 
This proof is based on the moral phenomena of the world, 
the sense of right, and the anticipation of reward and 
punishment. In this argument, as in the previous one, 
every thing depends on the philosophical interpretation 
we give to this branch of our constitution. We are endeav- 
oring to show that without a clear recognition of spon- 
taneity, there is no sufficient basis for theism, a belief in 
a personal God. Those who deny liberty, or identify it 
with necessary, causal connections, can not consistently 
recognize the right as an ultimate, an intuitive, law. Such 
a law is wholly out of place unless it is accompanied 
with the power of obedience. The ethical sense, as pre- 
senting an independent, primitive inducement to action, 
and thus constituting with the appetites, passions, tastes, 
an alternative which affords the grounds of a rational 
choice, is itself an integral part of our freedom. If we 
reject the spontaneity which is to avail itself of this 
opportunity of selection, we have no logical escape from 
rejecting that intuitive law which is wholly fragmentary and 
powerless without it. Hence the ethics which goes with 
the doctrine of necessity is that of utility, a resolution of 
the right into a perception of the useful, and the feeling of 
obligation which accompanies it into a sentiment sedu- 
lously inculcated by society, and established by social and 
organic transmission. Hence our moral nature is only a 
branch of our intellectual nature, and no better conclusion 
can be arrived at from the one than from the other, as we 
look off from these heights of our being in search of God. 

This is very plain if we scrutinize closely our premises. 
We started our lines of proof with cosmical effects of any 



70 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

character. With these we could mount no farther than 
to other cosmical effects of like character. We were 
hemmed in to the path of physical causation, physical 
forces. We then made a second effort to rise, choosing 
our effects, selecting those which contained a manifest 
intellectual element, and hoping to pass thence to a 
true spiritual being. W T e fared no better than before, 
because our philosophy had robbed mind of spontaneity, 
and presented all its activities as the play, though the 
latest and noblest play, of causes. We therefore gained 
nothing in our transfer, we were still under the same fatal 
physical connections. We could, if we chose, infer intel- 
ligence, but intelligence itself had become for us enclosed 
in nature ; as crystals are enveloped in the saturated, secret- 
ing fluid. We now start a third time and select the moral 
nature of man as the highest attainable eminence. This 
is our last effort, yet it can avail no more than previous 
ones, since we have no fundamentally new premise, are 
in fact on the old ground. A law evolved and enforced 
by experience, transmitted and strengthened under it, till 
it becomes an inwrought constitutional tendency, a second- 
ary product of intellectual powers, fixed and necessary 
in their development, can give no new light, can not rear 
a torch so high as to show the whence and whither of a 
spiritual soul, as to disclose a Creator enthroned above and 
beyond his works. From like to like is still the method 
of our proof, and a moral nature in God, such as the one 
now disclosed in man, would only be the slow establish- 
ment, the steady coming to the light in him of the laws of 
use incident to things and to his own activity under them. 
We have no real forecast, no absolute freedom under 
it ; we are painfully yet necessarily, with indefinite jostle 
and friction, shaping our actions to the exigencies of the 
facts about us. The consciously anticipatory and 



THE BEING OF GOD. 7 1 

voluntary portions of the adjustment are illusory ; nothing 
is real save the fixed, underlying forces around which 
these intellectual images play, and which by themselves 
and of themselves are reaching a perfect equilibrium, a 
complete interplay, with other forces. Any vision of free- 
dom and responsibility which arises in this evolution may 
operate as a vision, as itself the expression of a graded 
and settled force, but by no means implies any correspond- 
ence of the invisible, final facts with itself. 

Such a moral nature we may, if we please, transfer to 
our Deity, but it can not lift him any more than it lifts us 
above the cosmos. It must rather identify him with it, as 
itself the product and expression of natural forces. We 
are thus pressed down to the low level of causation with- 
out the slightest upward bent in the path we are pursuing. 
Nor, indeed, have we any occasion, in our ethical pre- 
mises, for God, a personal and free being beyond nature. 
Nature is dealing with us stringently and successfully. 
The moral constitution of man and society, as now laid 
open, presents nothing beyond the range of physical forces. 
Showing nothing but necessary effects, it requires nothing 
in explanation but fixed causes. A Deity enthroned over 
such a world is a superfluity. Present facts are all traceable 
to previous ones, and these to others beyond them. This 
retrogression is the delight of the causative impulse in man. 
It seeks nothing more, and can make nothing of anything 
more, if it is given it. Thus, if we test the ethical argu- 
ment in its intrinsic strength, it fails. Or if we allow it 
to succeed, it still fails by not knowing what to do with its 
new, strange, outside factor. The explanation of nature 
offered by the being of God is beyond the range of all the 
conditions of thought present to the philosophy under dis- 
cussion, since that philosophy excludes spontaneity, origi- 
nation. A free being would find nothing which he could 



72 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

do in a universe ruled by complete, inexorable law. Law 
is omnipresent; it excludes all along its progress the in- 
tervention of personal power, and equally excludes it at 
the outset. The outset and the issue must be one in 
method, or the one in reference to the other becomes 
anomalous and abortive ; involves principles that have been 
sedulously excluded. 

The Deity reached by this argument is necessarily the 
God of pantheism. The view of Schleiermacher is the 
conclusion which consistently flows from a purely causal 
interpretation of nature and man. Wisdom, goodness, 
holiness in God mean simply the causality in Him which 
produces these attributes in us. Absolute power means 
all power ; God, as the absolutely powerful being, is the only 
cause or the sum of causes. The world is the substance 
of which God is the life, the pervasive, controlling force. 
There is in man a God-consciousness, that is a conscious- 
ness common to God and man, a consciousness which 
contains the highest evolution of the spiritual nature of 
each. The intelligence of the world, whether present in 
nature or man, in a physical law or a spiritual perception, 
is the divine intelligence, defined in each instance by the 
very fact which expresses it, and pushing forward to its 
highest development in the human soul. 

A belief in such a Divinity does not transcend the 
premises on which it has been made to rest under the doc- 
trine of necessity. By a pure causal connection the uni- 
verse is evolved out of, contains and is contained by, its 
Creator. The very essence of this notion is that the effect 
and the cause exactly measure each other, that the cause 
is to be regarded as the invisible force, the inherent nou- 
menon, which inlies, sustains, and successively unfolds all 
effects. Such a Deity is homogeneous with his acts, in each 
instance reaching the measure, and in no instance exceed- 



THE BEING OF GOD. 



73 



ing the measure, of what he is doing. He is also in har- 
mony with man, for his form of being and measure of 
power are, like those of man, wrapped up in those grand 
causal connections which pervade all being. Such a God 
is most intimately united to man, as man is his highest 
development. Both together touch the light in conscious- 
ness. The God consciousness is the common conscious- 
ness, and the spiritual expression of both alike. Such is 
the coherence of pantheism, such its logical development 
from its initial idea ; yet how utterly nugatory are the moral 
impulses which it is able to furnish. 

But can not origination, liberty, be assigned to God 
even though denied to man ? No ; for various reasons. 
If all man's action can be explained by coherent forces, if 
thought, volition, inspiration are with him an expression 
of fixed, immutable laws; then thought, volition, inspira- 
tion may everywhere, no matter what their compass, be so 
referred ; nay, as one in kind must be so referred. Intel- 
ligence is one, whether it be that of man or of God, and 
if it be causal in the former case so must it be in the latter. 
The relation of intelligence to law will be identical with- 
out regard to the being whose it is, since the word expresses 
a specific conception brought to our notice in man, and 
interpreted by what we see in him. 

Moreover, if we reason to the being of God, expound- 
ing the relation of the universe to him, its adaptation of 
means to ends, by what we see in man's action, then we 
can not infer any other intelligence in God than that which 
in man calls forth and sustains the argument. It is this 
exact form of intelligence in man which leads us to infer 
intelligence in God, and the intelligence inferred, therefore, 
must be in keeping with that with which we started. 

If spontaneity is an absurd conception in reference to 
man ; if it is a denial of law, an acceptance of fortuity, it 
4 



74 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

will be equally so when applied to God. If man can not 
originate, can give no absolutely new impulse, because of 
the inherent impossibility of the conception, neither can 
God, for the same reason. We can not relegate an ab- 
surdity to the Deity, having rejected it from the constitu- 
tion of man. God must be at least as rational as his works. 
Or if we grant liberty to be an admissible element there, 
we allow it also to be one here. 

If our philosophy admits no explanations which do not 
rest on immutable law, and contemplate its universal 
reign, then, if we grant spontaneity in God as a necessary 
condition of creation, we shall none the less not know what 
to do with the new conception. We have ruled the idea 
out of science, out of knowledge, out of order, because it 
enters in to arrest all exact thought. We can not, there- 
fore, place a notion like this, the logical equivalent of 
chance, at the beginning of all things, as the comprehen- 
sive, inclusive term that is to bind them up in rational 
comprehension. We must, in some way, recognize origina- 
tion as an orderly fact, a resting point, an integral term in 
the universe, before we can exalt it to the highest of all 
positions, and make it the root and norm of all things. 
We must find something like unto God before we reach 
God, or we shall not, in our thoughts, attain unto him ; he 
will remain to us an anomaly, an absurdity. This like- 
ness of God is man ; in his image we are made. Philoso- 
phy insists on it as strenuously as inspiration. To what- 
ever point we drop man, to that grade of being must Deity 
drop. Infinity does not transform, it only extends quali- 
ties. If we start with causal dependencies, and the abso- 
lute reign of law, we must carry them with us all through. 
God sinks into the universe which he utters, and which 
equally utters him. Man, as a personal power, is lost in 
the forces which flow through him ; and with him goes 



THE BEING OF GOD. 75 

down the only type, is extinguished the only light, that 
can disclose and expound a spiritual universe, resting as 
a spiritual heavens above this crass, cold, physical frame- 
work of things. In our own measure is given the cubit of 
the sanctuary. Every estimate of the mind, restricting its 
powers, reduces the reflection it offers of the divine nature, 
circumscribes its knowledge, and narrows its inheritance 
on every side. If, as many are ready to affirm, it be a 
question not pertinent to the case, "Is the will free?" and 
one that should be set aside by the inquiry, " Are we free 
to do as we will ? " then, by this transfer of freedom from 
mind to body, from its seat in the soul to the external con- 
ditions of action, our whole spiritual constitution, and the 
constitution of the spiritual universe, of which our consti- 
tution is the type, is shaken, and, riven through its lofty 
arches, begins to crumble. Overthrow overtakes the cen- 
tral span, slipping its base and crashing down through 
every secondary support. The too ambitious structure 
collapses by its own -weight, and discloses, in the com- 
pleteness of the ruin, the insufficiency of the device upon 
which it was reared. 

Those who, striving to strengthen the decrees of God, 
or lengthen his foreknowledge, allow these conceptions 
to subvert human liberty, in so doing lose the very majesty 
of the power they sought to defend. The glory of God's 
government is its strictly free spiritual character. Infringe 
on liberty, and that government sinks to a physical basis, 
and God becomes a semi-vital, semi-intellectual force ; a 
demiurge, descending lower, and rising no higher, than 
man ; a soul of the universe whose laws bind him down 
like chains of adamant; a formless impersonation c r hysi- 
cal forces, that lies half-crushed under the w„.t\j he 
sustains; a painful aspiration rather than a glorious inspi- 
ration, laboring, panting upward in the yearnings of the 



76 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

human soul, so remote from good. As power slips 
from man, it slips from God as well, and the universe 
becomes the residuary legatee of us all. 

There is one other proof of the being of God some- 
times offered, that of intuition. It is said to be " simply 
the utterance or attestation of the soul in the presence of the 
object, which it does not so much discover by searching, 
as apprehend in the act of revealing itself. It is not an 
argument, an inference, a conclusion. It is an attestation, 
the glimpse of a reality which is apprehended by the 
instinct of the worshipper, and through the poet's vision as 
much as the gaze of the speculative reason. It is not the 
verdict of one part of human nature, of reason or con- 
science, the feelings or the affections ; but of the whole 
being, when thrown into the poise or attitude of recogni- 
tion before the presence of the self-revealing object." * 

The article from which this assertion is taken contains 
a very able discussion of the proofs of the being of God. 
We should have felt constrained to acknowledge a large 
indebtedness to it, had we not in a prior article, in the 
Bibliotheca Sacra, given the gist of the discussion now 
offered. We are reluctant to disturb this view of a direct 
intuition, yet it so far differs from the constituents of 
faith yielded by our analysis, and seems likely to have so 
slight a hold on the mass of minds, that we can not put 
aside the desire to restore the lost elements in the proof. 
It is not intended of course that God is visible to the 
physical eye, nor in vision to the imagination. Have we, 
then, an intuitive power by which, without inference, we 
apprehend spiritual being? And can God be made the 
object^ this inner vision ? We do not even see ourselves, 
or know our own spiritual essence ; our most intimate 
friend is hidden from us ; yet is God, as a real entity, 
* Theism, British Quarterly Review, July, 1871. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 77 

nearer to us than either ? There are intuitive ideas 
involved in the satisfactory establishment of the being of 
God, and the inferences under them are very simple and 
direct, so much so as to be made by the mind familiar 
with them almost unconsciously ; but there they are, and 
correct analysis must always disclose them. We seem to 
see the distant tree, and pronounce directly on its locality 
and size ; yet the rapidity of our conclusion does not 
cancel the judgments it contains, or remove it to the cate- 
gory of pure intuitions. When the feelings are awakened 
by a sense of God's love, his overshadowing power and 
spiritual presence, the inferences by which we have arrived 
at a knowledge of him may be sunk out of sight, and out 
of thought ; we may seem to possess the most personal, 
complete and undeniable attestation of his being ; we may 
say in the fullness of faith, We know that he is, and 
that he is the upholder of those that trust in him ; yet 
this flooding of the soul with conviction, with those affec- 
tions which are its immediate fruits, does not alter the 
sources of proof, they conform to them, and flow from them. 
We see, indeed, easily and perfectly by having seen often, 
but the constituents of vision remain the same. The 
reality of the sunrise glory we rejoice in, and still rest on 
intuition and experience ; neither support can be removed. 
We start the proof of the being of God — the mingled 
intuition and inference — with the doctrine of spontaneity. 
There are thus recognized two classes of events in the 
world ; those that demand for their explanation a previous 
event made up of equivalent constituents of force, which 
have been passed over to the fact before us ; and those 
which are referred to a rational agent, looking to nothing 
back of him. In spontaneity there is an arrest of force, in 
causation a transfer of force. The one fact measures the 
impulse that gives rise to it, the other reveals, without 



7§ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

compassing, the power which has brought it forth. Lines of 
thought are beginning, volition is disclosing fresh strength, 
every moment ; within us, on all sides of us, are true po- 
tentialities. Pure intelligence, pure emotion, pure volition, 
are of this spontaneous character, finding a sufficient and a 
final reference to mind, a true beginning in the human soul. 

This fact is taken as the initial idea of our argument, 
the explanatory principle we bear with us, in threading the 
universe, and confronting its problem of being. We have 
found true origination in man, the origination of thought, 
the initiation of action. On this idea we are able to rest, 
going backward ; with this to start, going forward. We 
see intelligence, a universal, pervasive adaptation of means 
to ends, in the world about us. It is not found simply in 
single things, in detached series of events, but in the entire 
make-up of the globe, its elements, their properties, pro- 
portions and spontaneous products. This intelligence, in- 
structed by our philosophy of man, we refer also to a true 
and sufficient origin, to a personal God. We are reasona- 
ble in making reason as an objective product proof of 
reason as a subjective power, a personal power, a form of 
being distinctive of it. Thus the wisdom of the world, 
which is the world, drops out of the mind of God, and dis- 
closes momentarily and everywhere his personal being. 
We carry our conclusion precisely as we carry the conclu- 
sions of hourly life. The proof may well enough be, there- 
fore, more plain to the common mind without analysis, 
than to one who has analyzed its data and missed their 
true elements. The moral nature of man, and the moral 
government to which he is manifestly subject, lie as proof 
in the same direction, and establish with equal strength 
the moral nature of God. 

Thus the Deity comes before us as he is presented in 
his works, with the intelligence and ethical temper which 



THE BEING OF GOD. 79 

these disclose. God is a God above nature, for we started 
with a power not subject to nature. Lodged in the human 
soul, thought and volition have ruled over and wrought 
with the physical forces about them, yet more may they 
do this, lodged in the divine soul. 

Neither is the Deity, whose being we have arrived at, 
the mere equivalent of nature, the term in force which 
balances the phenomenal member of our equation. The 
form of proof is much the same as in the teleological or 
ethico-logical argument, but the conclusion measures its 
breadth by the breadth of the premises. No thought or 
labor of man exhausts his liberty, or spans his potentiality. 
Hamlet, Macbeth, thirty-six dramas, are not the equiva- 
lent of Shakespeare. There was in him the possibility, 
certainly, of farther, perchance of better, production. 
From Hamlet alone we can infer a mind whose scope is 
not to be definitely set down, a power whose works must 
be waited for rather than predicted. A product in itself 
quite limited, gives rise to a boldness of inference and 
sanguineness of expectation, when man is the subject of 
calculation, quite beyond the disclosures of that first effort. 
Milton's potentiality is greater than the Hymn of the 
Nativity. From a universe like this which surrounds us, 
we legitimately infer boundless resources, a potential hold 
upon forces which makes any universe possible. The po- 
tentiality of such a product is what we understand by infi- 
nite power, as no limits can be set to a strength which in 
a single putting forth runs through the stellar world, yet 
gathers up every subordinate fact in a planet like our own ; 
which weaves in all order and all beauty as the constitu- 
ents of its effort, the inevitable on-going of its work. 

It may be urged that we have no proof that any phys- 
ical force is begotten of man's spontaneous power, and 
that, therefore, we have no right to refer physical forces to 



80 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

like spontaneity in God. We are certain that the will of 
man does, in some way, so touch the forces of the world, 
as to initiate for them lines of action ; so start, direct and 
check them, as to put them at his disposal. If this be 
accomplished solely through the medium of forces already 
realized in our physical constitution,- it matters not. 
Power is still potent as regards forces, though the method 
of its efficiency is unknown to us-. We may certainly, then, 
attribute to God a control that includes all forces, and the 
more so as these forces, in the very law of their action, 
in their quality and method of combination, are permeated 
with intelligence. The thought and the force are so 
interwoven that we can no more separate them than we 
can the physical and intellectual elements in human speech. 
We are not, moreover, arguing under causation, but under 
the rational reference of intelligent action to an agent ; and 
this conception gives us scope and freedom. We may 
enlarge our conclusions on various sides, guided therein 
by the more adequate explanation thus given to the facts 
under consideration. From a single invention we infer in 
man and society an intellectual state of a given grade, and 
transcend every way our premise. We justly ascribe to 
God all that control of forces which his work indicates, 
though it surpasses in kind, as well as exceeds in degree, 
that which belongs to man, or that which is present in the 
product considered. We are dealing with intelligence, 
liberty, large and elastic conceptions, and this is the pre- 
eminence of our proof over that which rests on the utterly 
rigid, barren idea of causation. For this very reason it 
is that we insist on the necessity of the one notion and on 
the incompetency of the other. The facts expounded by 
causation find' no pause, no comprehensive term, till they 
are united with the higher class which springs from voli- 
tion. Will alone is an integer, a starting point, a finality ; 



THE BEING OF GOD. 8 1 

causation is a perpetual flow, a stream without fountains, 
a race without a goal, an explanation that is lost the 
moment it is made, a circuit of balls that is maintained by 
returning each to the air the instant it is caught. Com- 
prehension is only possible when the two conceptions are 
united, the details of interior relation assigned to the 
one, and the compass of out-lying boundaries left to the 
other. Spontaneity, and this only, can be enthroned 
above the universe, and give rest to it, and rest to the 
mind in contemplating it. Here is a beginning, and from 
it there can spring a compass and a conclusion. In causa- 
tion, there are partial plans, details of execution, but no 
edifice, nothing which the mind can put together, round 
out, and say it is complete. How long the thoughts will 
delight themselves in these mere fragments of truth, these 
restricted, explanatory processes, these shreds of order, it 
is difficult to say, but plainly the final disappointment will 
only be the more complete and bitter on account of them. 
Threads of thought that run forever on and lead us no 
whither, most of all weary and distress the eager mind. 
j The argument, then, for the being of God is most 
simple and direct. Believing in the spontaneous power 
and fruitfulness of the human mind, and guided by this 
light which comes from within us, we place the fact of a 
universe, centered in wisdom and radiated every where by 
it, full of rational life and even now ruled by ethical law, 
on the one hand, and over against it the conception of God, 
a personal being, the adequate source of this creation, and 
we feel that the two are mutually sustaining, involve and 
explain each other. Infinite power and complete wisdom 
are the elements included in such a product, and such a 
product without these in a personal source, remains an 
insoluble enigma. Because the conception interprets the 
fact, the fact proves the conception, and adds it to itself 
4* 



82 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

as another fact. This is the finality of all proof. We 
accept a cause merely because we have an effect ; the foot- 
print in the sand brings with it the man who made it. The 
mind will accept nothing alone, its logical continuity will 
not allow it. Some second complementary fact is 
involved in a first fact. The complementary fact of a 
universe is an Infinite God. His infinity, his power are 
put in counterpoise with this great weight, and sustain it. 
So peace is given to it, and to the human mind. Ration- 
ality is nothing more than this, the insight of the mind 
into the conditions of being ; and this is its insight, this 
its self-justified conclusion, as regards the origin of all 
things. The act is not different in its principles, nor 
more complex in its details., than that by which I infer 
the being of the friend at my side. God walks in the 
garden, and we hear his footsteps, and listen to his call. 

This connection is so natural, so necessary to the 
mind ; its belief in its own liberty, that it itself is a pri- 
mary power, is so inwrought and complete, that men have 
reasoned under the notion of naked causation, and from 
this barren conception, by an interior expansion of it in- 
evitable to the free spirit, have arrived at the idea of God. 
The conclusion was not in the premise, it was in the human 
soul. The mind went beyond its verbal statements, tran- 
scended its formal data in behalf of primitive convictions, 
and an inborn sense of power. Only a few materialists, 
here and there, have been able so to keep down their words 
and humble their thoughts, as to reach, as they logically 
ought to reach, a demiurge, hidden in the universe and 
burdened by it as a structural carapace. This has been 
possible as a feat of logic to Hume, and a few others ; a 
nobler inconsistency has belonged to divines and most 
philosophers. They have believed in God even when they 
have found no rightful throne on which he could be seated. 



THE BEING OF GOD. 83 

They have accepted, under the clear insight of reason, 
what they have formally denied under the logical state- 
ment of favorite dogmas, under their analysis of mind. 
The bleak, desolate path of proof has come to an abrupt 
end ; the spiritual nature has furtively unfolded its wings, 
and with a sudden sweep risen to its true elevation, and 
sought its true home in the bosom of God. Nor does 
it seem unfit that the fundamental truth in religion should 
rest back in proof on liberty, for what are the commands 
and what the incentives of our spiritual constitution 
without the power to follow them ? 

The foundations of interpretation, belief, are laid in 
the human soul. This is their security ; they may be cast 
down for a little, but can not be permanently subverted. 
We can only be true to God as we are true to ourselves ; 
or believe in him for what he is, as we believe in ourselves 
for what we are. Divine origination turns on man's spon- 
taneity, the two conceptions rise and fall together ; and we 
find God at the same time that we find the power to love 
and obey him.* 

We have striven in this chapter to give in their bear- 
ings on theism, the true out-comes of our beliefs concern- 
ing man and nature ; and we think it to be established as 
a logical impossibility, that any proof can be secured for 
the being of God without the initial idea of liberty. We 
give these results, not that our philosophy may be forced 
into one mould or another, but that we may know what 
we do believe, and what are its corollaries. It will be no 
more possible in metaphysics than in mathematics ulti- 
mately to take the proposition and reject the scholium, 
and the quicker we save ourselves the effort the better. 
Our scholiums will be accepted by others, if rejected by 
ourselves. Let it not be thought that our proof is too 

* Hume's works, vol. I, p. 227. 



84 A PHILOSOPHY OF RFXIGION. 

precise, and narrows the Godhead. The Infinite includes 
the best, the highest, the most personal ; but finds no 
measurement in it. We feel no reverence which prevents 
our assigning all that we have to God ; our reverence does 
give him a compass of being quite beyond it. 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Attributes of God. 



TT is the intuitive action,' the rational grasp, of the 
-*- mind that renders it capable of explanations, that leads 
it to seek explanations. It evokes and rests in reasons 
by virtue of the same powers. These powers lead it to 
supply the idea of a free, intelligent, and hence personal, 
being as the origin of the universe. But in order that this 
being may remain the complete and final fountain of all 
existence, he must be at once infinite and absolute in 
power. This arises from the necessity of the case, from 
the nature of the explanation offered to the universe by the 
being of God. Theoretical causes are made to exactly 
correspond to the known effects seeking resolution, and find 
their proof in a precise equivalence. We believe that the 
strata of the earth's surface first indicate and then estab- 
lish the past existence of certain conditions adequate to 
their production. So God, in his attributes, must be com- 
mensurate with the purpose for which he is evoked by the 
mind. His attributes rest, for their logical necessity and 
proof, on the same ground as his being. He must be, and 
he must be with powers proportioned to the explanatory 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 85 

office he fulfills. The being and the attributes are insep- 
arable parts of our proof, at least so far as these attributes 
are necessary to make him the sufficient source of all 
things. Hence God is eternal, and infinite in power. If 
he were finite in duration, the reason which leads the 
mind to seek for him as God would compel it to go in 
search of another. If he were limited in power, those lim- 
itations must arise from forces external to him, beyond his 
reach ; or from an internal weakness, incapacitating him 
for certain efforts. In either case he ceases to be that 
fullness of being which is to the mind ultimate. The 
restrictions of his nature require a further solution, and 
the mind is again thrown back in search of a true Infinite, 
an Existence that is not drained by an exigency, nor taken 
up by a product, nor its limits reached by an accumulation 
of finite measurements ; that does not itself sink into the 
finite and dependent in explaining it. Thus the question 
of power is put at rest precisely as is that of space, when, 
moving freely in the stellar universe to all distances, we 
say of this, its enclosing condition, it is infinite. Any 
other supposition issues in new perplexity. 

It is involved in infinite power that it should be abso- 
lute, that is independent, in two ways ; neither restricted 
from within nor conditioned from without, save by its 
own activity. Man, as finite, is not more straitened in 
the amount of force which he can command, than he is in 
the results of that force by the external conditions under 
which he must employ it. God, as the personal, ultimate 
source of force, puts it forth into a void, and suffers no 
limitations, no reactions, save those which he forecasts 
and frames for himself. The reaction is as much his own 
as the action. The conditions which he meets are his, 
are those shaped to this very end by a coexistent, rational 
purpose. 



86 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

It is strenuously urged by Spencer, that the infinite is 
a pseud-idea, an inconceivable term, which eludes all pur- 
suit, which, in its highest form, we can at the best only 
designate as the Unknown. We briefly reply, that the 
universal and perfectly intelligible use of the word, by him 
as by others, is the best of all contradictions to the asser- 
tion. One conception of the infinite after another could 
not be set aside, if there were not attending on the criti- 
cism a higher and more complete notion, in behalf of 
which each in turn is rejected. The very assertion, that 
neither this nor yet this is the infinite, implies a latent con- 
ception of the infinite, and a comparison between the two. 
We grant that the infinite is not in any of its applications 
an object of imagination, nor of judgment; and is, there- 
fore, not, in the narrow use of the words, conceivable nor 
thinkable. But the infinite, as in space or in time, is 
referred by us to an intuition, and ought not to be man- 
ageable by the imagination, working under the forms of 
the senses ; nor by the judgment, proceeding under the 
idea of likeness and unlikeness. Not only must the infi- 
nite, as when applied to space, be pronounced a familiar 
and satisfactory notion, it is one peculiarly clear and intel- 
ligible. We speak safely of a thousand miles, and employ 
the conception exactly and correctly, but stretch out those 
miles by land or by sea ; push downward with them into 
the depths of the earth, or pass upward with them into the 
heavens, and the imagination gives us but the most vague 
and inadequate image of them. They are, as expressing 
any concrete thing, thoroughly inconceivable. This fact 
in no way limits our use of the words in any of the diverse 
ways in which we wish to employ them, nor our reaching 
conclusions by their means of mathematical accuracy. 
Compared with these, and a hundred other concrete state- 
ments of constant and careful service, the idea of the in- 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 87 

finite is most simple and complete. Consider one point 
in space ; how utterly undefined is it in position ! Con- 
sider a second, no matter how remote from the first, as 
being its exact counterpart, equally undefined, and we 
have the notion of the infinite fully involved and clearly 
evoked by the insight of the mind. The fact that a trans- 
fer of a thousand miles has not, in reference to space, 
altered one single relation, that the one position can not 
be separated from the other, save as we keep them both in 
mind, and so establish a contrast between them, discloses 
at once the absolute irrelativity of each point in space, 
and hence the boundlessness of space. There are no refer- 
ences within or without it, save as we establish them by 
taking positions ; and each position falls into an infinite 
void. Ruskin finely says, " That which we foolishly call 
vastness is, rightly considered, not more wonderful, not 
more impressive, than that which we insolently call little- 
ness ; and the infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only 
unfathomable ; not concealed, but incomprehensible ; it is 
a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure, unsearcha- 
ble sea." # 

Spencer, in an article in the Popular Science Monthly, 
says, "I fail to perceive humility in the belief that human 
thought is capable of comprehending that which is behind 
appearances ; and I do not see how piety is especially ex- 
emplified in the assertion that the universe contains no 
mode of existence higher in nature than that which is pres- 
ent to us in consciousness. On the contrary, I think it 
quite a defensible proposition that humility is better shown 
by a confession of incompetence to group in thought the 
cause of all things; and that the religious sentiment may 
find a higher sphere in the belief that the Ultimate Power 
is no more representable in terms of human consciousness 
* True and Beautiful, page 11. 



55 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

than human consciousness is presentable in terms of a 
plant's functions. " * Such is Mr. Spencer's rebuke of Mr. 
Martineau for a want of reverence. At the risk of shock- 
ing this type of worship, that hides its Deity in a shekinah 
of clouds, darkness and ignorance, in place of one of inap- 
proachable glories, we must still be permitted to look up- 
ward along the clearest beam of light that comes to us, 
with the devout belief that it, above all others, issues direct 
from our God. We may consistently affirm, as Spencer 
may not affirm, that the Infinite overpasses on every side 
both our conception of him, and the revelation that is 
in the facts which disclose him to us. 

We reason to personality, to potentiality. We see 
how vastly the facts of intelligence and goodness in the 
world outstrip our measurement of them ; we also remem- 
ber how immeasurably the wisdom and love of God go 
beyond this single, incomplete utterance of them, an utter- 
ance perplexed by moral problems whose extended bear- 
ings we poorly apprehend, and, with a faith that has defi- 
nite direction, that is to the soul a compass, we sail forth 
into the boundless ocean of being, waiting on larger light ; 
not more blessed by what we have than by the promise of 
what we are to have. If we reasoned only from causes, if 
we had humbled mind into a plexus of physical forces, we 
too should prefer a blank, the blank labelled the Unknown, 
to a being so fatally limited, so fearfully known, as must 
be the Deity, standing as the last term to this chain of 
proof. As it is, the best we have is certainly for us a bet- 
ter sacrifice than no gift ; Infinite Wisdom and Love a 
more devout ascription than the Unknown, of whom it is 
impossible to affirm, notwithstanding our worshipful capi- 
tal and the inference we suggest by it, personality, that he 
transcends humanity, or even expresses any form of real 
* No. 3, p. 322. 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 89 

being whatever. Is it not the absurdity of reverence to 
withhold from the being worshipped — though it may well 
enough fall to such reverence to deny worship — substan- 
tial existence of any kind ? This is a transcendentalism 
that effaces utterly the steps by which it ascends, and so is 
unable to say whether it has gone up or down in its alleged 
progress. 

Quite another class of philosophers, represented by 
Hamilton and Mansel, declare the infinite to be incom- 
prehensible, and relegate religion to faith as its true 
foundation. Its incomprehensibility is still made one 
with its inconceivability, its transcending of the construc- 
tive powers of the imagination, and requires no farther 
consideration. This entire perplexity concerning the 
infinite is the fruit of the false philosophy of Locke and 
Hume, reducing all knowledge to the type of sensation. 
Instead of the philosophy disproving the infinite, the 
infinite disproves the philosophy. We must decidedly, 
however, object to seeking foundations in faith for dogmas 
that have been pronounced without support in reason. 
Faith must have a rational ground or basis, or its objects 
and sentiments become superstitions. Religion can be 
purged by reason alone. We are quite content to accept 
mingled insight and feeling, as a complex rational state by 
which we reach conclusions quite impossible to pure 
thought. The coloring of thought is feeling, and without 
feeling we may miss the most essential part of the thought. 
Hence a faith which springs from an emotional realization 
of the truth, which grasps it at once on its intellectual and 
living side, may carry us forward to conclusions quite 
beyond the scope of logic. The spiritual convictions, the 
aroused life, of the soul become premises full of the 
highest and most pregnant proofs. But to remand to 
faith what has been rejected at the tribunal of reason is a 



90 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

very different thing. This is to divorce feeling from judg- 
ment ; and to set up our last court of appeal in the former 
aside from the latter. This is to subvert the order of our 
powers, and to commit the sceptre of reason as against 
reason herself to the unanalyzed, unguided feelings. No 
confusion could be greater. We may well cease to consult 
reason if she is no religious oracle, if the holiest truths 
offered us are beyond her reach. Mysticism at once has 
the field. A reason that mounts into the light, winged by 
thought and emotion alike, is one thing, and a reason 
that flutters in the darkness, and must finally be taken in 
its feebleness and blindness under the tuition of the feel- 
ings, is quite another. 

In addition to this primary inconceivability of the 
infinite there are urged farther objections by Mansel 
against the absolute, the infinite, as incapable, when 
granted as conditions of the divine being, of allowing a 
putting forth on the part of God of any intelligible 
activity. " The Absolute can not be conceived as con- 
scious, neither can it be conceived as unconscious ; it can 
not be conceived as complex, neither can it be conceived 
as simple ; it can not be conceived by difference, neither 
can it be conceived by the absence of difference : it can 
not be identified with the universe, neither can it be 
•distinguished from it." * 

The ground of this difficulty is double. Mansel forces 
upon the words infinite, absolute, in their application 
to God, a metaphysical fullness that we are not inclined 
to accept. He says, " A mental attribute, to be con- 
ceived as infinite, must be in actual exercise on every 
object, otherwise it is potential only with regard to those 
on which it is not exercised ; and an unrealized potential- 
ity is a limitation. Hence every infinite mode of con- 
* Limits of Religious Thought, p. 79. 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 9! 

sciousness must be regarded as extending over the field 
of every other ; and this common action involves a per- 
petual antagonism. How, for example, can Infinite Power 
be able to do all things, and yet Infinite Goodness be 
unable to do evil ? " * We are bound in thought by no 
such rendering as this of the infinite in its relation to the 
attributes of God. Nay, we are bound rather not so to 
use it, since such a use makes the result incoherent, 
contradictory, absurd. God is not necessarily infinite in 
his attributes in any and every use of the word, but infinite 
only with that infinity, if any, which involves perfection. 
The perfection involves the infinity, not the infinity the 
perfection. The attribute exists first, and that infinity is 
predicated of it which is applicable to it and consistent 
with its relation to other attributes. If it admits no 
infinity, or admits it only in one direction, very well ; we 
are not called on to thrust an arbitrary definition upon it. 
Space is infinite in one way, time in another, and power in 
quite another. To speak of 'power as infinite in the same 
way as that in which time or space is infinite is an absurd- 
ity. Infinity in power covers potentiality ; potentiality is 
the enveloping mantle by which alone power can become 
infinite. Power as realized is necessarily finite, precisely 
as the universe is finite. The fixed term in each case is 
the attribute in its own nature, and this defines in what 
form, if at all, it shall receive the adjective, infinite. 
We would accordingly say of goodness that it is perfect 
rather than that it is infinite, as found in God ; since 
completeness is the idea consonant with it rather than 
extent. Infinite power, in a rational, worshipful use of the 
words, does not require that that power should be to the 
full each instant in exercise. Potentiality is an essential 
feature of personality, and potentiality in personal power 
* Limits of Religious Thought, p. 79. 



92 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

takes the adjective, infinite, under its own limitations and 
interpretations. 

Mansel, in like method, argues, that the Absolute can 
not be a cause, since a cause is put instantly into relation 
and limitation by an effect. Again we answer, we define 
the absolute by the personal and not the personal by the 
absolute ; the adjective by the noun, and not the noun by 
the adjective. Man, as exerting physical force, finds that 
force met and modified in its effects by exterior forces on 
which and with which it acts. A reaction follows at once 
upon his action. When we say of God, the supreme per- 
son, that he is absolute, we mean that his activity deter- 
mines all its own conditions ; that all being is put forth 
by him, and that he both gives and accepts the limits of 
his creative force. We are not bound to the contradictory 
statement that he, in the same act, establishes and annuls 
conditions. The Absolute is not without the restraints of 
order, but he assigns them to himself by his own rational, 
creative activity. To insist "that God must remain forever 
absolute in his attributes, in the sense of being out of rela- 
tion and limitation through their various activities, is to 
overrule by the force of an adjective absurdly applied, the 
very vigor and nature of those attributes to which it has 
been attached. No such conceptions are obligatory upon 
us. If we affirm consciousness of God as a necessary fea- 
ture of the highest being, then we do affirm it, and God is 
no farther infinite or absolute than consciousness admits 
of his being. The attribute is the necessary thing, and 
not the degree ; the attribute can not be abolished by its 
own degree, but accepts the degree or quality or condition 
only so far as it is able to. An infinity or absoluteness 
that trenches on consciousness is a reduction, not an increase, 
of the nobility of God's nature. If God is good, he is con- 
ditioned to goodness ; if wise, then is he conditioned to 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 93 

wisdom, and we mean this when we call him good and 
wise. If God is thoughtful and active, if he combines the 
two elements of power, complete knowledge and inexhausti- 
ble force, he combines them none the less under the limita- 
tions of personality, and this leaves him free to exercise 
them as he will. No compulsion is put upon him by their 
possession, making him the necessary organ of his powers. 
In this exercise he establishes those limits which his action 
as wise receives. It would be as rational to say, that it 
is a degradation of reason, that it involves connections and 
limits, as to say that it is a restriction put upon God, that 
he, as an uncreated, rational being, acts rationally, 
accepts and exercises his ownunderived powers, by choice 
puts order into them, and by them into all things. 

The Infinite Person, a spirit, infinite, absolute, com- 
plete in his attributes, as each allows ; this is the ascrip- 
tion of our reason ! While the nouns, person, spirit, direct 
attention to the very substance of the conception, the essen- 
tial essence of divine character, the adjectives, infinite, ab- 
solute, complete, expand the form and conditions of it beyond 
all human experience, and hence all exhaustive statement. 
We are indebted equally to the two elements for our con- 
ception of God ; — to the formal as to the real, and to the 
real as to the formal element — a conception that can unfold 
and enlarge and diversify itself endlessly without the loss 
of identity, essential integrity. As the cloud grows by the 
diffusion of like conditions, heaps itself up in towering 
masses, and darkens half the sky ; is frayed out again by 
the winds and drunk up by the warm and thirsty air, and 
yet expresses the same unchangeable forces that lie back 
of all appearances, beautiful or sublime, threatening or 
benignant ; so the thought of God is present to the human 
soul under many shifting images, all uniting to utter, yet 
never quite to disclose, his abiding attributes. These con- 



94 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ceptions come and go in our spiritual heavens, and express 
for us our present attitude toward the hidden powers that 
abide there, that gather and group, for correction, for 
guidance, and for government, the secret impressions, im- 
pulses and imaginations of the mind. 

The rational formula for the attributes of God, reason- 
ing upward from that which is highest in his works, is, This 
and more. Its two constituents are equally essential. If 
the This is not present, then is God for us nothing ; a some- 
thing, if a something, utterly unknown. The argument 
before us will not allow this conclusion. The highest in 
his works express somewhat that is in the worker, in him 
as a constitutional element, an essential force of his being, 
for this is that which he has put forth in his labors. Nor 
will the proof any more accept the This, as all that belongs 
to a primitive, personal agent. The depths of potentiality 
lie back of it, and the second element represented in the 
word, more, becomes the indispensable condition of that 
growth and enlargement of thought toward God, by which 
he is to us the goal of our spiritual being, its comprehen- 
sive, inexhaustible term. Renan has happily rendered 
this feeling, " Does art, which like religion aspires to rep- 
resent the infinite under finite forms, renounce its mission 
because it knows that no image can represent the ideal ? 
Would it not vanish into the vague and intangible the 
moment it aspired to be infinite in its forms as it is in its 
conceptions ? So religion exists only on condition of being 
very definite, very clear, very limited, and, in consequence, 
very open to criticism. The rigid, practical and special 
side of each religion, which constitutes its weakness, con- 
stitutes its force ; for men are drawn together by their nar- 
row thoughts far more than by their broad ones." * 

" From poetry we shall demand expression of that in- 
* Religious History and Criticism, p. 44. 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 95 

stinct of the infinite which is at once our joy and torment — 
at all events our greatness."* Let us not oppose the poet- 
ical to the scientific, and so confound it with the fanciful 
and the unreal. To poetry we rightfully commit the high- 
est and most profound and most absolute truths of our 
being. Religion is closely allied to art in resting like it on 
intuitive and deeply emotional conceptions. Religion is 
the most central, most productive, point in art, and it 
carries with it preeminently the same struggle after renewed, 
varied, enlarged expression, the same incessant strife 
between unfathomable substance and the variable forms, 
which, in the beginning seem to express it, and then, with 
slow transition, first to restrict and later to subvert and 
destroy it. If such are the conditions of spiritual growth, 
of the expansion of those germs of rational insight which 
are the glory and the consolation of our being, why should 
we quarrel with them, why, in peevish blindness, fret at 
and cast away the preliminary conditions of life. The 
stages of ascent, the rudiments of knowledge justify them- 
selves from above rather than from below. The partial 
and incomplete, accepted as transitional, lose each instant 
their fragmentary and disjointed character. If we do not 
know, it will be because we will not learn ; and we will 
not learn, because we need to learn, because we are van- 
quished by the earliest temptation of ignorance, to wit, to 
reject first truths as partial, inadequate, incomprehensible. 
So they are, but they can not otherwise be first truths. 

Supreme power includes infinite, inexhaustible force, 
and complete knowledge. Complete knowledge includes 
complete holiness. Knowledge and feeling are insepara- 
ble in the higher departments of thought. They are the 
heat and light of the same activity. Ethical knowledge 
involves ethical feeling, and, therefore, to be complete in 
* Religious History and Criticism, p. 165. 



96 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

wisdom is to be complete in righteousness. The intellec- 
tual branch of being can not be perfect without a corre- 
sponding perfection in its correlative, emotional branch. 
To misfeel is to misunderstand. Thoughts and feelings 
like limbs unite in one trunk, and separately and con- 
jointly share and enlarge its strength. The righteous- 
ness of God therefore is supplementary to his attributes ; 
these could not exist in their integrity without it. Perfect 
holiness seems the more fit expression rather than infinite 
holiness. It is a thing of kind and completeness, not one 
of quantity. Every action with God is permeated by that 
rational quality expressed by holiness. 

These higher attributes, the universe, as primarily a 
physical product, and, as a spiritual product, inchoate and 
imperfect, feebly discloses. The purified soul reaches the 
conviction by the earnest forecasting of its own desires, by 
an intense realization of its own longings, and of the law 
of life and inspiration which these imply. For the clear 
enunciation and large disclosure of God's holiness and 
love we look to Revelation, the Inspiration of fervent 
spirits, and this is among the chief purposes it subserves. 
Righteousness seems to us to gather up and hold in 
subordination all the moral attributes of God. Justice, 
mercy, love, all find expression under the law of holiness, 
toward the ends of holiness ; are all based on the desire 
of holiness, that perfect character which, to the eye of 
reason, unites in complete harmony every capacity and 
every power. 

Some speak of justice as if it were an absolute, inde- 
pendent, moral sentiment, demanding for its satisfaction a 
certain conjunction of reward and merit, guilt and pun- 
ishment ; and upon this immutable principle they build 
their entire governmental system. We look upon justice 
as making claims no more absolute and inexorable than 



THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 



97 



those of mercy. Both receive their limitation from right- 
eousness. The mercy which subserves the ends of char- 
acter, of holiness, is wise, all other mercy is mistaken and 
foolish. Justice accepts the same law. To withhold 
punishment when punishment promotes holiness, and to 
punish when punishment simply inflames passion, are 
acts of the same low moral character; both are the sub- 
stitution of impulse for rational purpose. If mercy may 
baffle justice, equally may justice baffle mercy. Justice 
breaks its bounds, inflicting punishment when forgiveness 
is able to open the paths of life. Love, that is wise, 
rational love, love with insight and forecast, moral love, 
is the controlling affection of a holy being. God is love. 
Justice, mercy, indignation, pity play their parts under 
love, present no absolute claims that may not be overruled. 
All absoluteness that is in them is given to them by the 
adoption of wisdom and love. God is as merciful as he is 
just, and just and merciful in obedience to wisdom. No 
sufferings stand as the fixed concomitants of ill doing, no 
quantitative pleasures are the settled accompaniments of 
obedience. Punishment in kind and degree is fixed by 
the exigencies, the moral state, of the person subject to 
it, and of those associated with him. Punishment is 
graded to a disciplinary and governmental work, and above 
or below that work is mischievous. The love of God 
issues from his own holiness, and issues in a persistent 
effort to impart holiness to others. So are the character 
of God and his government knit together. We arrive at 
this conclusion as contained in the perfection of his 
nature ; we find nothing in nature to contradict it, and 
every thing in Revelation to confirm it. It is to us the 
inspiration of our most inspired thought, the light we have 
when nearest Heaven. 

One complete attribute involves completeness in every 
.5 



9^ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

other attribute. Imperfection anywhere breaks the circle 
of perfect ministration, and brings in weakness and limita- 
tion everywhere. Not to give to God the highest we have, 
is to lose him j not at once, perhaps, but by the slow and 
certain decay of thought. 



CHAPTER V. 

Nature. 



WE have said sufficient to indicate that matter is, 
under the line of argument presented, to be referred 
for its existence and properties unreservedly to God ; that 
a rational explanation of it as the substratum of the uni- 
verse calls for this. Increasing knowledge modifies our 
view of matter in two directions. The mind first conceives 
of it as mere material, indifferent, save by general adapta- 
tions, to the edifice into which it shall be built. The chief 
wisdom of the world is found in its arrangements, its con- 
structive plans, and to these matter is looked upon as sub- 
jected by an outside, edificatory force. Science revolu- 
tionizes this opinion. Matter is seen more and more to 
contain within itself its own laws, to hold in itself those 
constructive forces which make the world a place of fixed 
activities, of creative, progressive work. Matter being 
given, in quantity and quality, the world is given, as a 
physical structure. The analogy of a building is seen to 
fail, and that of a living organism takes its place. Matter 
as matter, in its various forms and interactions, is con- 
structive ; and the world was substantially made, at least 
in its physical frame-work, when its elements were brought 
into being, and placed in connection. Hence matter must 



NATURE. 99 

be referred immediately to God in its nature and proper- 
ties, in its building efficiencies, or the very foundations of 
law, of beauty and of strength, are laid without an archi- 
tect. If this were possible, any subsequent edifice that 
might be reared by them, or built up with them, would fail 
to disclose his presence, would be made to share the blind 
growth, the inherent order found to exist in its chief ele- 
ments. Hence matter, as containing the wisdom of the 
world quite as much as its essential forces, is referred with 
a double necessity and weight of proof directly to God. 

A second change in our estimate of matter, is shown 
in our increasing apprehension of its dynamic character. 
We start with a statical idea. Matter seems to us in most 
of its forms inert, dead, passive, receiving force, but scarcely 
putting it forth. Knowledge constantly modifies this view, 
till at length we regard its more quiescent, stubborn forms, 
wood, rock, iron, as a concentrate interlock of forces, forces 
in as immediate exercise as those of the compressed spring 
or the drawn bow. Gunpowder now becomes the image 
of matter-; we have but to meet the right conditions, and 
out leap imprisoned giants. Even in irresolvable elements, 
we find forces that are constantly grappling with and hold- 
ing close the most expansive energies. 

The simplest form of force, that which we seem to our- 
selves best to understand, is mechanical pressure. Science 
has shown us that a large part of the forces held in matter 
can be transformed into, or at least be replaced in, equiva- 
lents of this kind of force, and thus find the most clear ex- 
pression and definite measurement that belong to them as 
forces. The fuel that passes in the steam-engine from one 
form into another, yields, in the transition, a large amount 
of mechanical force. This change of chemical composition 
has been attended by an evolution of force. Force, there- 
fore, in one or another form of exertion, seems more and 



IOO A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

more to the mind to lie at the centre of comparatively inert 
properties. The fuel has become largely volatile, but in 
so doing has let slip a great deal of energy. Thus in- 
structed by a constant transfer of passive resistance into 
active energy, we pass over to the other view, and regard 
matter as compressed, combined forces, and that its varie- 
ties express the number, intensity, methods of combination 
and of movement, among these forces, forces now close- 
bound and now enlarged, according to the phases of ma- 
terial existence which they assume. The deadest things 
thus contain the liveliest energies, and the liveliest things 
the laxest energies. 

The province of our senses is invaded by this explana- 
tion. We take cognizance of motions rather than of things. 
Color and sound are wholly referable to forces as occasion- 
ing motion; the sensations of heat, electricity, pressure, at 
once accept the same solution, till matter becomes to us 
simply centres of forces able to produce certain effects. 
The atom, as a dead material thing, disappears, as it can 
offer no proof whatever of its being, either to the senses or 
to the mind. In its place come variable, elective forces, 
capable in manifold combinations of building up many 
simple and complex molecules, which, themselves already 
intricate and well-ordered structures, enter as complete 
architectural members into the visible frame-work of the 
material world. Forces, the power to produce given effects, 
explain the sensible properties of matter, and receive no 
additional light from a dead, inert centre back of them. 
To the mind force can as easily be ultimate as matter. 
Matter, as a material something, lingers only as the survi- 
val of first impressions, crude, unexpounded sensations, 
when the material world seemed passive rather than active. 
As an inert nucleus disappears, matter goes with it, and 
force becomes the substratum of a simple assemblage of 



energies. Force is the causal, invisible substance, and to 
put an unknown something beneath this is to place a cause 
under a cause, to destroy the simplicity and directness of 
thought with no gain whatever in its clearness. Till force 
intervened between matter and its properties, we had oc- 
casion for an inert substratum ; but this is now displaced 
by an active one. To insist on both is an illustration of 
the vicious tendency of putting back of an occult fact, one 
yet more occult by way of expounding it. 

Reducing then our conception to its smallest terms, 
we look upon matter as centres of forces, modified in 
intensity, direction, composition, motion ; and we refer 
these forces directly to God. This is the simplest circuit 
of sense, of intuition and inference, most directly and com- 
pletely satisfies the thoughts, and so has the proof which 
the mind gives to its own processes. The power of God 
momentarily underlies the universe, since force requires 
instant and constant sustentation, is an activity not an 
endurance, a dynamic not a static state. This, or a 
kindred conception, serves its purpose if it steadies the 
intellectual steps, or helps them onward. Ultimate views 
so lack what men are accustomed to call proof — which 
means little more in this connection than familiar, exper- 
imental steps — as to take away from many minds all 
pleasure in following them. There is a shallow empiri- 
cism which casts contempt on theories that transcend a 
concatenation of physical facts. Those who have no occa- 
sion to move conjecturally, thoughtfully, in a high sense 
rationally, above the level on which the facts themselves 
lie ; who feel no impulse to take a birds-eye view of the 
world ; who are content with the intellectual food nearest 
them, and confound all digressions and flights of the 
rational impulse with dreams and fancies, are so censo- 
rious and contemptuous in view of these conjectures which 



102 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the soul casts forth, seeking its own, letting down its net 
with faith into the invisible depths of this oceanic being 
which encompasses us, waiting on natural and supernatu- 
ral, inspired and uninspired, suggestions, that we produce 
and pass our thoughts on this topic rapidly. Those who in 
their spiritual experience are helped by a theoretical view, 
gathering in and interlacing the lines of thought, will 
quickly catch it, and reconstruct it for their own inner 
uses. 

These spider webs of speculation, by which the mind 
moves from one salient point to another, with all their 
lack of strength, play an important part in the life of every 
wide-ranging and earnest spirit. They stretch across the 
rifts of thought, unite things in conjectural solutions other- 
wise incomprehensible, strengthen faith, and often become, 
even to the slow-plodding steps of empirical inquiry, what 
the first light cord that spans a chasm is to the iron 
cables and iron track that shortly bridge it. 

Before we pass from the nature of matter, and its 
immediate dependence for its forces on the energy of the 
divine will, we wish to lay a little stronger emphasis on 
what we do know — know about phenomena and the forces 
that sustain them. Knowledge that is accompanied with 
an image is to many minds more satisfactory than that 
which is divested of an image. The reason is obvious. 
It is more closely allied to the senses. The senses gain 
by constancy, by familiarity of impression, an undue pre- 
ponderance, and they impart this to their shadowy counter- 
parts of the imagination. 

The senses have the start in fhe race of powers. 
They are the earliest, the most constant, the most prac- 
tical, avenues of knowledge. Many forms of philosophy 
are confirming their ascendency, and a relative authority is 
thus attached to their testimony which by no means 



NATURE. 103 

belongs to it It also frequently happens that at those 
points at which our knowledge is becoming exhaustive, 
science succeeds in inserting one or two more phenomenal 
facts. This process is peculiarly satisfactory. Great light 
seems to be cast upon the subject, and we overlook the 
fact that the final phenomena, when we reach them, as we 
quickly do, stand in the same unphenomenal, and so far 
inscrutable, relation to invisible forces as did the previous 
ultimate facts which they have displaced. Whatever 
knowledge we may gain of molecules and atoms, we 
rapidly approach an ultimate in reference to which all 
phenomenal conceptions fail us ; a point at which the 
senses and their adjuncts break do.wn, and leave us a last 
fact, an inconceivable conclusion, a something quite dis- 
tinct from the phenomenal series it brings to an end. 
When one body collides with another, and motion is 
imparted, it is not the included facts of the vibrations of 
particles that explain the phenomenon ; its ultimate refer- 
ence is to a transmitted force, a force which the mind 
supplies as the essential condition and radical feature of 
the problem. The phenomenal links, less or more, are 
nothing without this. This force is known, known without 
an image, and is that through which knowledge comes to 
the series of images strung upon it. Impressions alone 
are not knowledge. If they are, then the bewildering 
images of a fever are knowledge. What makes impres- 
sions to be knowledge are the places, the times, the forces 
by which the mind unites them into a coherent, perma- 
nent general experience. We do know forces in knowing 
their effects, and to desire to know them phenomenally, 
under farther images, is to mistake the inherent nature of 
the truth offered to us. It is surely a bewildered impulse 
that leads us to ask to know a thing in a way contrary to 
its own nature, to know what is not to be known in the 



104 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

form in which we wish to know it. The force is known, 
known in the effect, exhaustively known there, according 
to its character. It is an irritation of the senses that 
prompts us to ask for more. Not to rest contentedly in 
an intuition is to refuse to begin to know, is to debase 
knowledge to a series of senseless and unsubstantial 
appearances. 

Claiming, then, that we grasp one side and the more 
substantial side of the universe through the intuitions, as 
firmly as we do another through the senses ; that we com- 
prehend it in its forces, periods, places, quite as much as 
through its phenomenal impressions, these being but the 
data for those, we ask, what are the purposes which nature 
subserves in its relation to us as intellectual and religious 
beings? We are far from assuming that the universe is 
confined in its rational ministrations to man. This por- 
tion of its service may be relatively trifling, but it is none 
the less to us that known portion by which we are to judge 
of its purposes. Nature is a fixed middle term between 
us and God, affording the conditions of independent and 
dependent action on our part. It puts possibilities within 
our reach, gives us paths which we can pursue. It places 
forces commensurate to our strength at our disposal, and 
offers all the physical, mental and spiritual conditions of a 
career. Nature is at once the putting forth and the with- 
drawal of God's power, the giving to us that which is 
needed, and the leaving with us that which has been given. 
It is the school of thought, industry, freedom. If nature 
were not given as a detached, fixed, mutable-immutable 
system of facts, the frame-work of our intellectual and spir- 
itual life would be lost. The physical world, in its liabili- 
ties, its fixed laws, imposes action and gives its conditions. 
The world instantly becomes a discipline, one which, 
while it handles men with severity, — a severity, however, 



NATURE. I05 

not too severe, if we consider those who are the subjects of 
it — and holds them to stern responsibilities, stimulates 
and rewards them freely, and fits its motives to every 
variety of character, bringing the highest incentives to the 
highest minds, and bending with a narrow motive to 
craven, appetitive souls. If the individual often succumbs, 
yet the schooling is so thorough, so comprehensive, that 
the nation, the race, nations and races, are gathered in 
and united by it in the slow achievement, first of civiliza- 
tion, then of enlightenment, and so of life. 

The universe, in its simple, initial forces and leisurely 
evolution, becomes the ground of knowledge. The human 
mind is thus able to range everywhere, backward toward 
the beginning, outward over the fluctuating, ever-expended, 
ever-renewed waves of activity, forward toward the end 
which all things predict and hasten. The slow unfolding 
of the divine energy along lines previously indicated, and 
rigidly adhered to, is the condition of human thought, 
yields the measured, finite steps by which we go where 
God has been before us, by which we are from the begin- 
ning until now put in companionship and fellowship with 
him. The infinite power of God thus secures an apprecia- 
ble development, fields in space and time over which it 
can be unrolled, and becomes to man the chart of his own 
and of the divine being. We touch not the bounds of any 
thing, we are every where lapped in God's infinite attri- 
butes, in knowledge, power, prevision ; yet we everywhere 
appropriate only such portions as we are able. For that 
which startles the senses, but only confounds the thoughts, 
the merely supernatural, is substituted that which brings 
a marvellous stillness to the ear, but a wide wandering 
forth of the mind along the ways, the records of divine 
work. God is not in the thunder nor the earthquake, but 
in the still small voices of nature. 
"»* 



Io6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

The world does not merely address itself to man, as an 
active, free, thoughtful being ; it is also fitted to him as one 
who should know the will and ways of God. Nature is as 
full of the character of God as it is of his thought, and it 
yields its spiritual treasures slowly, only because we slowly 
acquire the power of discerning the ethical element, which 
always accompanies the intellectual one. The faithfulness, 
minuteness, completeness of God's supervision are taught 
in nature as they could not be otherwise. Universal law, 
that is, universal regulation, is the first truth of science. 
Every inquiry proceeds on the ground that the lines of order 
run in all directions ; that the orderly sequence and interde- 
pendence of facts are complete ; that there are no facts out 
of relation, and no leap from one series of them to another. 
This is the naked statement of the postulate of science ; 
it is emphasized to the eye by the beauty, the perfect fin- 
ish, which attend on even the secondary forms of being, 
the snow-flake, the flower, the insect. The omnipresence 
of God thus passes from a dogma of the mind to a fact of 
the senses. 

A secondary, less understood disclosure of character in 
the physical world is that of fixedness, coherence, adhe- 
sion. The links are all interlocked one with another, and 
there is a peaceful, continuous, unswerving pursuit of his 
purposes with God. Nothing is thrown out of its depend- 
encies, and nothing is supplied by mere will ; will runs 
under and through and with reason, and reason passes on 
from the incipient to the complete by its own suggestions. 
What lesson is more in order to man than this ! What 
should be the form of his constructive life but this, the 
strength of patience, the sure convergence of measurable, 
finite, often feeble forces on their one work ! This is seen 
in the relation of efficient to final causes in the world. 
There was a time when men were quite willing to explain 



NATURE. I07 

construction by final causes. It was easily said of this 
and that. God so designed it for such and such a purpose. 
The particular event or construction was thus made to 
depend forward on the purpose, rather than backward on 
its historic antecedents and conditions. It was cut off 
from the general, generative plan, and made to rest exclu- 
sively on an act of will, a special, personal impulse. Such 
a method baffled science in its inquiries. Hence an oppo- 
site tendency has taken possession of many minds. Final 
causes are looked on with suspicion, and rarely admitted 
as satisfactory or exhaustive reasons of anything. The 
eye is habitually turned in the opposite direction, and the 
inquiry perseveringly put, What antecedent state gave 
rise to this especial development ? Explanation is looked 
for in efficient, rather than in final causes. 

In both views there is partial error. Nature combines 
them both. The principle of adhesion to data, to primi- 
tive and self-sufficing forces, whose steps of combination 
are all traceable, does not admit of a ready insertion of 
special adaptations, of detached, creative acts. The new 
must stand conjoint with the old. Thought must have its 
unbroken lines. The organ must be granted a history, 
interlocked with the history of the organism of which it is 
a part. On the other hand, final causes can not be ex- 
cluded ; efficient causes get no current, no direction with- 
out them. Whatever be the method by which these are 
shaped to those, it is manifest that they are so shaped. 
The initial forces are forces working toward ends, develop- 
ing in these directions ; not enlarging themselves at ran- 
dom. Chance evolution is not evolution, at best it would 
be here advance, and there retrogression. This develop- 
ment falls to lower as well as to higher forces, to chemical 
and mechanical movement, as well as to organic move- 
ment. The survival of fhe fittest, is but one among the nu- 



Io8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

merous conditions which determine progress, a movement 
toward the ends of order. Certain things are to be done 
with certain means in a certain way, and therefore each 
stage in the advance, each part of the structure, takes a 
double explanation, a historic and a constructive one. 
Each proceeds under the conditions of the other. Things 
are shaped by such and such, means to such and such 
ends. It is impossible, and it is irrational, to. exclude 
final causes. Take animal functions. It is the larger 
half of our knowledge to know the purposes which they 
subserve in reference to each other, and it is largely to aid 
us in this inquiry, that we search out historically their rise 
and relations. If we prosper a little, here and there, mak- 
ing our forces work blindly toward wise ends, we shall not 
so prosper as we should, if we would allow the light of in- 
telligent purposes to fall on the paths of development by 
which they are reached. It is a sort of violence and wrench 
from which the mind, the representative of intelligence, 
cannot but suffer, this implication that the diffusive wis- 
dom of the world is reached without wisdom, that lines of 
thought have no forecast in them, that light is the product 
of darkness. 

It is by the constant presence and interplay of these 
two elements, the historical conditions, efficient causes, 
and the constructive ones, final causes, that God teaches 
us a patient handling of facts, a holding fast to what we 
have, a steady involution of it in higher and holier ends, 
the exhaustive use of the thing that is, instead of an impa- 
tient wish for the thing that should be. 

A third spiritual lesson of the" world, closely allied to 
this, is that of progress. Without attempting to make out 
any connection between the slow evolution of the physical 
universe and the character and attributes of God, this is 
plain. Were it not for this measured, progressive movement, 



NATURE. 109 

this accommodated step of the Divine Power, we should 
not be able to keep pace with God's wisdom, nor under- 
stand its work. As instantaneous it would be untraceable, 
the vanishing path of a thunderbolt. Neither should we 
be able to work with God, to unite our labors to his in a 
fellowship of purposes, to walk with him in hope. The 
progressiveness of his plans is their line of alliance with 
human powers. 

Yet the fixedness of physical forces, their continuity 
and certainty, which make them subject to anticipation 
and supervision, do not pass to the opposite extreme of 
fatalism, and leave man bound with them under one invin- 
cible law, the slave not the master of nature. Man takes 
the initiative of government in freedom, high above physi- 
cal forces, and so is able to introduce new conditions, 
and give new directions to old ones. Physical agents and 
laws are bowed to service without being broken, and bound 
by their very coherence into steadfast obedience. What 
would otherwise be the. melancholy, terrible certainty of 
events, their inevitable, lethargic flow, is- broken up by 
man's constant descent upon them with modifying power, 
and by the incalculable incidents which belong to the in- 
terplay of so many agents, a portion of them free. The 
world is as full of exigencies as of certainties, and results 
having to us the force of accidents, calling for instant redi- 
rection, are the issues of the most settled laws. Hence 
readiness, intrepidity, faith, patience, courage are as much 
the fruit of this discipline of law as forethought and indus- 
try. The physical world is everywhere flavored with for- 
tune, though no one of its events is fortuitous. 

There is also in nature a supersensual substratum, 
gliding easily into the supernatural. We penetrate to 
the bottom of the phenomenal, to the end of its sequences, 
and there encounter a something no longer amenable to 



IIO A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

explanation in division, subdivision, interdependence and 
representation. It is so in matter. Each simple element 
yields an inscrutable force, true to itself, inexplicable to 
the senses, and the assumed unit for all later combinations. 
When we touch bottom in ultimate being, we do so in an 
agent that comes forth ready for its work, its commission 
given it in its own constitution, fortified by the invisible 
power of God, and as unsearchable and invisible as he. 
This energy is so far-sighted, so holds the keys of order, 
so works with untiring patience and growing wisdom 
toward creative order, that we come to feel in it, as in the 
works of man, the personal, spiritual impulse even more 
than the unconscious, imperturbable force. 

Passing a little onward, we see in the crystal definite 
arrangement. This discloses a new force or modification 
of forces, another ultimate term of inconceivable and 
admirable efficiency, lying back of the veil, and giving us 
these beautifully devised products in the presence-chamber 
of the senses. The frost etches the window-pane. We 
observe the wonderful tracery and locate the forces that 
have wrought it as companions of the other insensible 
forces that inhabit molecules, and encompass us in a sug- 
gestive, spiritual way. 

We move upward in inquiry and reach the plant and 
the animal with their complicated, definite, interdependent 
parts. Here are much more intricate agencies, working 
for more varied and extended results ; a portion of which 
are much less easily associated with any atom or sets of 
atoms as their ultimate seat. We know not how even to 
locate this new efficiency which is expressed by the word, 
life; an efficiency which has grown by small increments, 
but has none the less reached astonishing dimensions ; an 
efficiency that accepts development, but in so doing dis- 
closes rather than hides its marvellous nature. Put life 



where we will, as a controlling power, in the living thing, 
and it must work equally where it is not; express it by 
what additional property we will, assigned to atoms, and 
it will still transcend our conception, strangely vary its 
action, and suddenly choose a new method, according to 
the part or the exigency which conditions it. Life seems 
to pervade its product, to comprehensively shape and 
mould it according to a preconceived plan, and yet to use 
physical forces only, having an independent being and 
law in the various constituents of the structure. Life is 
an invisible architect, so invisible and inappreciable 
among the processes that go on under its supervision, or 
in the properties that the materials employed display, that 
we miss it as a distinct thing in experimental inquiry, and 
lay open its very existence to denial. Yet this denial 
leaves the chief thing, the peculiar thing, in the organic 
world unexplained ; leaves the order, the relations, the 
interdependencies — more curious than the material be- 
' tween which they exist — unaccounted for. We are told 
whence the stones of the edifice came, and who put them 
together, but no hint is given us of the origin or the plan 
of the structure. 

Such men as Spencer and Darwin cannot leave the 
problem just here, willing as they may be philosophically 
to resolve the close connections of causation into the loose 
sequences of time. They feel the need of some kind of 
force, some located efficiency to perpetuate the plan in the 
living thing, and be the medium of its transmission from 
parent to offspring ; to gather up and confirm the latent 
tendencies that have been impressed on the organism in 
insensible increments — increments so very small as to call 
for no precise reference, as to allow themselves to be con- 
veniently disposed of under the word variation. How the 
mind struggles with the difficulty, the secret necessity laid 



112 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

upon it, sucn words as these testify ; innate tendencies, 
intrinsic aptitude, hereditary proclivity, implanted in- 
stinct, reversion, atavism. Thought hovers around the 
subject, and knows not on what phrase to light, and 
accepts, more or less, mere word-dust, the whirling, airy 
involutions of speech in place of ideas. Spencer, pressed 
for a sufficient reason to explain the fact that a mere 
fragment of a Begonia leaf reproduces the entire plant, 
says, " We have no alternative but to say, that the living 
particles composing one of these fragments, have an innate 
tendency to arrange themselves into the shape of the or- 
ganism to which they belong. We must infer that a plant 
or animal of any species, is made up of special units, in 
all of which there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to aggregate 
into the form of that, species ; just as in the atoms of a 
salt there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to crystallize in a 
particular way." * This intrinsic aptitude he later endeav- 
ors to show resides in " physiological units," which are the 
primary organic compounds in the passage upward from 
chemical units. 

In much the same vein is the theory of Darwin, by 
which he ascribes the organizing, reproductive power to 
gem mules, which are thrown off by all the parts of the 
animal or plant, and by which, as they pervade in exhaust- 
less numbers the whole structure, is transmitted the 
right tendency at each exigency of the organism. So the 
inscrutable life-principle which has been driven out with a 
pitch-fork returns again in a form more perplexing than 
ever. We get rid of difficulties at one point only to rein- 
troduce them at another in full force. This materialism 
denies a thinking mind, and then makes matter think ; as 
if our conceptions could be helped in that way. 

How inscrutable the agency so lightly accepted in 
* Biology, vol. I. p. 1 80. 



NATURE. II3 

"physiological units." Themselves hypothetical in con- 
struction, in being indefinitely minute, they are thought 
each and all to contain the constructive plan of bulky 
organized beings, whose members may occupy years in 
receiving their complete forms, on which many offices, 
exact, complex and wide-spread, are to be impressed, and 
to which, in the later history of their development, there 
may be added the most subtile traces of remote, hereditary 
influences. In ordinary transmission, these units may 
disclose forces latent for generations ; in atavism, they 
may resuscitate forces far down the backward slope of time, 
and restore a type lost by the stretch of an epoch. They 
may for a time completely waive a power, and later, as 
completely resume it, without reason rendered. In this 
child, they may pronounce on six digits, and in that, born 
of the same parents, settle on five, or divide the hands 
between the conflicting tendencies ; and in neither case 
betray any vacillation. In these units, so diverse in ten- 
dencies, so decisive in action, so subtile in affinities, so 
distinct one from another in the same organism and in 
different organisms, we have many mysteries substituted 
for one mystery ; many powers for one power. Are we 
not at liberty to say of such agents what Spencer says of 
divine interposition. " Those who entertain the proposi- 
tion that each kind of organism results from such a cause 
do so because they refrain from translating words into 
thoughts. The case is one of those where men do not 
really believe, but rather believe they believe. For belief, 
properly so called, implies a mental representation of the 
thing believed ; and no such mental representation is here 
possible."* No claim could be more destructive of physi- 
ological units than this, that each statement must admit of 
translation into a mental representation. We do not, 
* Biology, vol. T. p. 337. 



114 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

however, concede the claim any more than we concede 
the units ; and we now leave them in each others keeping, 
not caring much which shall throttle the other. 

We refer to these theories only to show how these men, 
reaching, or coming near, a substratum of supersensual 
agency, strive, without recognizing it,, to turn back again 
into the phenomenal world, and that under suppositions 
which do nothing to explain the facts, and remove by one 
or two steps only the inscrutable power whose energy and 
reason are in itself. Judged by the criteria of conceivabil- 
ity, intelligibility and experience, which Spencer is so fond 
of setting up for his opponents, what advantage has this doc- 
trine of " physiological units," over that of Divine Power? 
" Physiological units " so endowed, are a mere name, some- 
thing quite outside the mind's experience and comprehen- 
sion. These theories have this fatal disadvantage, they 
strive to do what honestly they can not do ; by a jugglery 
of words to present things as intelligible which remain 
unintelligible. Points of transition can not be canceled 
in this futile, insufficient way. A phenomenal interpreta- 
tion of phenomena must have an end ; it plainly has an 
end before we reach physiological units or gemmules. 
These are mere nothings to the senses, to the imagination, 
to the judgment. The opposed theory accepts the transi- 
tion, and makes openly an intuitive, rational transfer to 
the invisible and supersensual. It does not gather up the 
whole wisdom of the world, its orderly forces, and crowd 
them back into hypothetical forms, increasingly unable to 
receive them ; it gives proportion between effects and 
causes, and makes the fountain as high as the stream it 
feeds. These wonderfully endowed gemmules, and physio- 
logical units ought, if granted, to find farther interpreta- 
tion in their own organization, something to which they 
can in turn be referred, or we have gone thus far to little 



NATURE. 115 

purpose, and have found at last what we might as well 
have found earlier, self-sufficing things. We have hit upon 
a complexity of office and nature compared with which 
everything else is simple ; an immateriality and breadth 
of function which collect at a vanishing, focal point, all 
other powers and functions, rather than give their pro- 
cesses, grounds and reasons ; and this we call explanation. 
It is the inversion of explanation, a passage from the sim- 
ple to the complex, the plain to the obscure, out of light 
into darkness. 

Spencer's words again happily characterize his own 
methods, " Surely thus to assume a myriad of supernatu- 
ral impulses " — and how much short of supernatural im- 
pulses, save in name, are these organizing units — " differ- 
ing in their direction and amount, given to as many dif- 
ferent atoms, is a multiplication of mysteries rather than a 
solution of a mystery."* Spencer, notwithstanding the 
great value of many of his works, and particularly of his 
Biology, is capable of lofty and precarious word-building. 
We instance the chapter on Variation. Under the idea of 
the permanence of force, applied unhesitatingly and theo- 
retically in all directions, external causes are set to play 
on functions, and through functions on structure ; their 
results are treasured up in physiological units, at hand to 
receive them, capable of anything, infinitely susceptible to 
impressions, and indefinitely retentive of them, till the 
mind is prepared to accept any series of changes as a 
necessary consequence of shifting environments. These 
merely verbal facts, these balls of the intellectual gymnast, 
are kept in the air under the image of close-knit, mechani- 
cal actions and reactions, equilibriums perpetually over- 
thrown and as often restored in a new form, till, by the 
jugglery of the artist, we are made to believe in the entire 

* Biology, vol. 1, p. 335 



Il6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

pliancy of organic structure, and the adequacy of physical 
forces to push it in any and all the ways of development it 
is pushing ; and this result is produced with no exact or 
extended consultation of the facts involved, or any suffi- 
cient exposition of the real relation between living powers 
and the physical conditions operative upon them, or effort 
to show how far the last as forces can be expressed as 
effects in terms of the first, and be organized into them. 
The imagery and the argument hinge on lower forces, and 
are hastily applied to higher ones, with slight confirmation 
or correction by experience. 

When we pass up to instinct in animals, from instinct 
to action directed by the senses, and from this to the 
rational life of man, we meet, at every step more manifestly 
with a supersensual element, one uniting itself in its affini- 
ties to a personal, supernatural power. The instinct ac- 
complishes the ends of thought without thoughtfulness ; as 
if the shadow of God's provident thought rested upon the 
"brute organism, and silently, by interior impulse, bore it 
to its ends. Conscious life, on the other hand, is a break- 
ing in of a little of that light which makes way for a spir- 
itual world, is the first condition of its being, while rational 
freedom holds in itself the rudiments of the new realm. It 
is, in its very putting forth, so far supernatural as to be 
amenable only to a higher law, and places the soul, whose 
power it is, in a position to comprehend, and sympathize 
with the supernatural. 

It is urged against nature as a product of Divine 
Power, as an intermediate term between us and God, that 
it discloses, in its constitution, defect, suffering and vio- 
lence, the violence even of cruelty. We will not stop to 
give these assertions the limitations and abatements that 
fall to them. We accept them as containing an unmistak- 
able residuum of truth, and answer, that the physical world 



NATURE. 117 

is hereby put in harmony with the moral world which it sup- 
ports, helps to express, quickens and holds in check. Man 
is the crowning feature of the world, and his ignorance, 
united as it is with stupidity, stubbornness and wickedness, 
calls for a stern school. That school our globe, in its present 
rugged constitution is, and was from the beginning fitted up 
to be. Looked at in its relation to man, we should be 
slow to demand, to suggest, to accept any important modifi- 
cation. The inorganic and organic kingdoms in their con- 
flicts, their bitterness, in the envenomed tooth, only fitly 
prefigure and dramatically render the warfare between man 
and man, and in the soul of man. They thus disclose the 
strict congruity of construction, the stern law of control, 
with which the moral strikes its roots to the very bottom 
of the physical, and sends its own life through and through 
it. Congruity is better aesthetically and ethically, than in- 
congruity. If the world were other than it is, if it were a 
piece of optimism, without defect, suffering, or violence, 
how much more atrocious would be the spectacle it would 
present under the mal-administration of man ! Indeed, 
how would the maintenance of perfection be possible, 
while its chief agent was perverse and perverting ; unless 
we were to have the constant intervention of God, restor- 
ing the mutilated, rectifying the wrong, and everywhere 
effacing the work of negligence and malice ! The sugges- 
tions of critics may deserve attention, but we fail to under- 
stand how the world could be made and maintained ma- 
terially better than it is for such a being as man, without 
the perpetual presence of that miraculous agency so offen- 
sive to most of those who propose improvements. Some 
devout, tender-hearted and trusting brother might crave 
the intervention of Heaven, but how shall a scientist resent 
the far-reaching, harmonious, vigorous yet self-consistent 
method now employed, and urge it as an argument against 



Il8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the divine wisdom and goodness ? Regarding the plan of 
creation as one shaped from the beginning, from the begin- 
ning including man as its consummate product, we accept 
its harsh features as essential parts of the whole, as the 
fore-falling shadow of sin whose dark history it was to dis- 
close, as the stern school in which transgression was to be 
taken in hand and mastered. 

Moreover, thus is the world made able to share the 
redemption of man, to travail together in pain with him, 
and with him to pass up into complete ministration and 
perfect beauty. To redeem nature, to mitigate its cruelty, 
soften its severity, develop its powers, and put it in grow- 
ing harmony with his own progressively purified spirit, 
becomes the work of man. - His home is made by him 
and possesses in that fact fourfold value. We feel con- 
tent with what God has given, and would not venture on a 
larger gift till we are made ready for it. So far the in- 
dulgences of the world have been productive of more mis- 
chief than its hardships. Suffering in the animal kingdom 
is only one more proof of how perfectly the lower is made 
to share the fortunes of the higher, how broad and search- 
ing is the sympathy among things. The horse in the hands 
of a cruel master presents the whole moral problem ; it 
has no more compact expression, unless it be in the care- 
less vivisection of a scientist. What shall we say to it ? 
On the side of man it is plain enough. He is left to his 
freedom, be it heartless or humane. On the side of the 
brute it stirs our sympathy and indignation, and God 
meant that it should. At this price, by this suffering, by 
man's suffering, by his own suffering, God purchases sal- 
vation. We allow the price to be great, very great. Is it 
too great for the thing purchased by it ? We thank 
Heaven that we are saved from reply, that God himself 
has answered, No. 



I 



NATURE. II9 

Spencer finds a strong objection to the immediate, 
creative oversight of God in parasites, two dozens of 
which or more infest man alone. Sin is a parasite ; in 
some of its forms strikingly so. It is an inferior life feed- 
ing on a superior one. We cannot feel the force of an 
argument which excludes a physical parasite, while a 
moral one finds admission. The general harmony of the 
physical and spiritual, the submission of the first to the 
second, should rather be with us first truths. The entire 
kingdom of parasites is best warred against by health, 
soundness of constitution, an insight that lays hold on the 
conditions of life and builds on them, a wise cherishing of 
that which is committed to us. This is especially true 
of man ; a mastery falls to him if he will meet its price of 
wisdom and integrity. It is quite in harmony with the 
divine plan that he should retain the government of his 
physical as of his spiritual life only on the condition of 
developed powers. So viewed, the sufferings of man occa- 
sion less difficulty than would the absence of these fatal 
liabilities. In the animal kingdom, we must judge these 
inflictions by its submission in harmony to that which is 
higher, by the subdued suffering which throbs along its 
duller chords of sensation, by the compensations of life 
over against life, that which is ruin to one bringing thrift 
to another ; compensations that pass into completeness 
in the vegetable kingdom. If there is to our minds still 
an unexplained residuum, it is a small demand that faith, 
fed by the general beneficence of God's plan, should wait 
for farther light. The ways of God will justify themselves 
to man \ but the time of justification must turn on the 
knowledge and temper of the critic. It may be as much 
a point of wise discipline to wait at one time as it is to 
see at another ; waiting always, however, on vision. 

We are embarrassed by the creative work of God 



120 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

because we conceive of it as a series of detached volitions, 
rather than as a firmly coherent plan. Allow the value 
of the causal relations, which evolution emphasizes ; admit 
their force in the divine thought, and much difficulty 
disappears. We cease to evoke the divine will as the sole 
reason, and the instant remedy, of everything. Reasons 
are seen to be deeper and broader than this implies, and 
to draw after them some unexpected results. 

The world is constructively full of wisdom, of forces 
firmly, with marvellous endowment and yet more marvel- 
lous interplay, working out that proximate and progres- 
sive order which fits it to be the abode of man, with his 
aberrant and potential gifts. We may say three things 
concerning it. We may affirm that forces, whatever their 
quantity and quality, must work their way toward order, 
and ultimately reach it ; that a system of actions and reac- 
tions must be set up, that will finally secure some form of 
equilibrium. There is so little to sustain this view, it is 
so plain that the order of such a world as ours is the 
product of its creative constituents, and the accessions 
these have received, that this supposition calls for no 
discussion, begging as it does everything, its first ingredi- 
ents, and order as essential to all ingredients. 

The existence of physical forces, physical elements, in 
the kinds and quantities in which they make up the physi- 
cal universe, may, at any period to which the theorist 
chooses to revert, be silently assumed, and their evolution 
may then be traced onward, reducing additions to a 
minimum, to accessions which can be overlooked or 
involved in their minuteness in the terms already given. 
The greatest obstacle to this second method, which 
postulates physical forces, and then unfolds them, is the 
organic world, which so obviously post-dates, by so long a 
period, the 'material substratum on which it rests. If the 



germs of life are in turn postulated, wrapped up in their 
simplest forms in the material forces which precede them, 
and are thence, by a maximum series of minimum assump- 
tions, enlarged to their present complex character and 
importance, each slight pilfer being repeated so often as to 
give the magnificent stealings now expressed by the entire 
vegetable and animal kingdoms, there yet remains the 
most serious consideration of all : How came there to be 
this growth, growth in such continuous and divergent lines 
of order ? At this point enters the theory of Darwin. Each 
change is, in reference to this inquiry, essentially acciden- 
tal ; being involved in an assumed tendency to indefinite 
variation under a shifting environment. Natural selection 
enters in to preserve the fittest, eliminate the less fit, and 
so impel progress. There are three difficulties with 
which this theory, when made a complete cosmogony, 
labors. Whence come its initial factors, forces marvel- 
lously endowed and proportioned, inwrapping the ovum 
of a universe ? Whence the increments that enter as 
farther terms of development, this capacity of indefinite 
variation, with conditions so apt for its development as to 
make of it the seed-field of the world, capable of giving in 
clear order those fittest things, worthy to be propagated ? 
How have the indefinite delay, stumbling, halting, and fail- 
ure of a purely chance process been evaded, the worthless 
factors, if any, been made so few, and life in each of its 
forms been compelled so uniformly to minister to life? 
Are we again to say that order, success are inevitable, dis- 
order and failure impossible? Natural selection itself, is 
nothing but an expression of that happy conjunction of 
forces which has been secured by a truly creative act. 

A series of assumptions at points so remote, in refer- 
ence to quantities so minute, as to escape attention, are 
the basis of this theory. Its logical basis would seem to 
6 



122 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

be, We may in the beginning assume anything, we must 
in later periods allow the introduction of nothing. The 
evolution of the world implies a finite period, We may 
none the less accept the eternity of matter, or leave unex- 
plained its origin, and early work before its present era 
was entered on. We may attribute to chance and blind 
forces increments we will not attribute to creative ones, 
rationally directed. So much to escape what, supervision, 
construction, means wisely proportioned to ends. 

If, however, we accept a divine origin for physical 
forces, if we accept steadfast sustentation and supervision, 
if we accept definite additions, additions definite in direc- 
tion and quantity ; " sports," allied to those which remain 
to us in plants and animals, allied to that by which the 
nectarine sprang from the bud of a peach, the facts which 
sustain the conclusions of Darwin, are included in our view, 
and the insuperable difficulties of his theory are escaped. 
The immense circle of chances through which every grow- 
ing point, every function, and every form of life must play 
as incident to reaching a fit development, chances of whose 
number and complexity there are no limits, no possible 
estimate, is escaped. We take wisdom in place of acci- 
dent as our architect. We no longer hunt for those amor- 
phous and abortive lives with which the world, among the 
living and the dead, ought to be crowded, but recognize 
organisms as we find them, the clearly drawn and steadily 
maintained kingdoms and families and genera of nature. 
Broad divisions, open spaces, extended lines of development 
are everywhere present in the animal kingdom. These are 
explained, and we are no longer compelled to regard each 
living thing as a centre from which new directions may be 
taken in all possible ways, a point of radiation, with the 
infinite criss-cross of adjacent points, confounding classi- 
fication. Cardinal distinctions have been established, 



NATURE. 123 

leading lines taken, and the product is one of order, an 
order so complete as to be the basis of science ; yet an 
order whose steps and limitations of growth are traceable. 
Fortuitous causes do not, and can not, explain these 
deeply drawn divisions. Accident should sweep over all 
bounds, and confound all distinctions. If each living 
thing and organ may be a centre of increments, and growth 
may be in any direction, natural selection can neither 
establish among the fittest, coherent, steadily maintained 
movement, nor winnow out with sufficient rapidity the 
immense, amount of malformation. We shall be com- 
pelled to seek some sufficient explanation of the kinds and 
lines of variation. 

To the third supposition, therefore, we return. The 
wisdom of first forces indicates their proper reference. 
Having accepted their divine origin, we have no objection 
to continuous, orderly additions, if facts indicate such a 
method ; while the supervision which attaches to the un- 
folding is in harmony with the creative impulse that gave 
rise to it. The rigidity of law, with the constant interlock 
of causes, conditions, is present for reasons already indi- 
cated, since God's work so lies level to the thoughts and 
labors of men. This severity is slackened, as occasion 
offers, since man thus finds more easily the personal 
thought that lies back of it. Law as law has no sanctity 
beyond the ends it subserves. God is not the slave of 
law, though the thoughts of men may be. How the two, 
creation and creative development, can be best combined, 
the personal and the physical, the universe shows, and we 
find no occasion to quarrel with the result ; we prefer to 
expend our strength in understanding it. Let each ele- 
ment, creation or evolution, enlarge itself freely as the facts 
shall become more fully known ; there is no indication 
that either will swallow up the other, and so blast the 



124 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

double fruitage of the world. Nature is not less, but far 
more, the ground on which God meets us, the garden in 
which he walks with us, because of evolution. It is only 
when the beginning and ordering and ending of evolution 
are denied, that God ceases to call unto us, and we to look 
unto him. So sink we, and are lost among the physical 
facts that we have been so hasty to exalt. Supervision, 
guidance, control fail us, and we are wrecked by our own 
shrewd, foolish thoughts, engulfed in a shoreless ocean of 
natural agencies. We live without hope, and we perish 
without pity, save as we stand one by another, mute and 
despairing. 



CHAPTER VI. 
Man. 



THERE are two elements in man's nature of most 
distinct character, distinct relations and genetic de- 
pendencies ; the physical and the spiritual. In the phys- 
ical, we must include not merely physical functions, but 
those conscious and unconscious powers which are involved 
in their direct use as members of an animal organism. 
We may be content to accept for the body any origin the 
facts shall seem to assign it. By the most undeniable 
proof it stands connected with the animal life below it, 
in plan, in minute details of structure, in lines of develop- 
ment, and even by parts which subserve no apparent pur- 
pose, lingering only as traces of a lower relationship. The 
body is evidently wedded to the dust of the earth, and runs 
in history by roots of affinity far back among physical forces. 



MAN. I25 

This statement does not accept as proved the doctrine of 
slight, fortuitous variations ; decided, creative changes meet 
the present conditions of the problem far better. It does 
not accept as sufficiently established the presence of man 
on the earth from a very remote period, and his slow de- 
velopment from an essentially animal constitution. It 
rather recognizes the certainly constructive, and the pos- 
sibly genetic, dependence of his body on the animal king- 
dom ; that one factor of the goodly structure of rational 
life was emphatically taken from the dust of the ground. 
Grant this, and all the significant, pushing facts of science 
are provided for, and settle to their place in the creative 
plan, without violence, or unreasonable assumption, or 
essential departure from experience. Conclusions that are 
now merely probable, are left either to fail or to establish 
themselves without theological distraction. Room is 
again made for free inquiry, and religion equally with 
science prospers by the concession. We have no respect 
for an effort to set apart a realm in some high, inaccessi- 
ble region to religion, which science cannot invade. This 
is to remand religion to obscure faith or downright super- 
stition. One of the primary offices of science is to break 
in on the region of faith, correct, limit and enlarge its 
grounds. A religion that refuses to be permeated by the 
light of knowledge, forfeits its claims on the human soul. 
There will be reserved points which science can not 
expound, but what she can expound must be gladly yielded 
to her exposition. 

When we come to mind, in its rational elements, there 
is a bold, broad transition, a chasm which no links span. 
The animal kingdom remains a helpless group on the 
farther side. No ingenuity of training or discipline makes 
a way for them over. There they tarry, fitted for an essen- 
tially stationary and a purely physical life. On the nearer 



126 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

side are the races of men. If we take the most savage of 
them all, which linger close on the brink in sight of their 
cousins crowding the farther shore, yet, at any time, they 
may strike their tents, and begin the long march of civili- 
zation and enlightenment. Thence started Grecians, 
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, in their great achievements, cer- 
tainly, not many centuries since. The second half of the 
scriptural assertion seems to us not less plain than the 
first. Having formed man physically of the dust, inwrought 
by his history with all lower forces, God breathed into 
his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living 
soul. 

The peculiar, the unparalleled spiritual powers of man 
are to be found in his intuitions, his rational insight. With- 
out a sound philosophy, a philosophy of ultimate ideas, — 
which alone to us seems sound — we confess to an entire 
inability to make anything of the truths of revelation, 
the being of God, responsibility, immortality. The animal 
does not share these intuitions, and here is found a differ- 
ence in kind marking a transition, a transition which no 
hypothetical steps of development can be made to cover 
without painful confusion of thought. It is enough for us 
to know that there is no proof of such intermediate grada- 
tions of life, that the simply physical, the merely intelli- 
gent, life ends with an abrupt line, and the rational, the 
spiritual, in full rudimental force, commences in men. 

We deny to the animal all intuitions for various rea- 
sons, which we must satisfy ourselves with rapidly 
enumerating. As high, positive powers, the proof of 
their being should be well established, not assumed. 
Very many deny even in the case of man that their 
possession is made out ; much more difficult is it certainly 
to win them for the animal. We are usually prepared 
for the conclusion by a strong feeling or a lazy assump- 



MAN. 127 

tion, that what is granted to man must also be con- 
ceded to the brute. That large school of philosophers 
who deny intuitions, should be more than satisfied with a 
doctrine which withholds them from animals. If they are 
able to construct a plausible theory of intellectual life, in 
its highest forms in man, without the aid of intuition, how 
easy should it be to do the same thing for the lower forms 
of intelligence. Every other power of mind, save intuitions 
and the activities they involve, are conceded to the animal. 
They do seem to possess that intelligence, precisely that 
intelligence, which acute senses, quick memory and lively 
associations, are able to confer. That this is very consid- 
erable, the fact that so many clear-minded men take it to 
be all that belongs to the human race sufficiently indicates. 
The whole force of attack, in identifying the intellectual 
life of animals and of men, it would seem should be di- 
rected against the concession of intuitions to the latter. 

The dominant philosophy of our time should be with 
us in withholding these from brutes. The more important 
point, their possession by man, "we have discussed at large 
elsewhere. 

When animals show a knowledge which comes to man 
by a combined intuition and judgment, they do so under 
circumstances which show that it is involved in their au- 
tomatic constitution. Animals have great mastery over 
space relations, but this mastery starts with a large con- 
stitutional endowment, and is perfected by a muscular and 
nervous regimen under an essentially automatic form. It 
no more implies an idea of space than does our own 
action in winking, feeding, walking or in any effort resting 
on an automatic basis. From the beginning a bird adapts 
its flight to spaces,- perfecting its direct, instinctive adjust- 
ments by muscular skill. We know that in our own action 
there is a constant automatic connection between sensa- 



128 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

tions and the exertions that accompany them, aside from 
volitions. One can bow his cravat mechanically and yet 
find himself embarrassed in doing the same thing when 
looking in a glass in order to guide his action. Many 
efforts glide smoothly in their automatic tram-way which 
are only confused by direct supervision, clear guidance. 

The training of animals, both by man and under their 
own experience, discloses their grade of powers, that the 
connection of mental states with physical actions is for 
them one of memory and automatic association. To start 
a connection between a sign and the action which should 
accompany it is the great difficulty in the education of 
brutes. When this is once done, repetition soon confirms 
it ; and hence this education we fitly term training, made 
up as it is mainly of reiterated impressions. In like man- 
ner the sagacity of brutes is developed in nature in close 
connection with their own lines of experience. Connec- 
tions, in some instances doubtless at their first occurrence, 
in others after being often repeated, impress themselves on 
the memory, slowly pass over to the automatic mechanism, 
and so become a settled portion of the sagacity of the 
animal. The directions of these acquisitions, their pre- 
cise and inflexible character, and the fact that they are 
transmitted so frequently by inheritance, unite to show how 
closely they are connected with the physical structure. 

Allied to these considerations, indicating the character 
of the knowledge of animals, are its stubborn limits. As- 
sociation works freely within the sensational bounds set by 
the life of the brute. Returning connections in this circuit 
are caught in memory, and established in organic habits. 
Beyond this, acquisition is impossible, because any sporad- 
ic dependence does not address itself to the thoughts, and 
is at once lost to the senses ; has no opportunity to settle 
into a fixed, constitutional connection, and is obliterated 



MAN. 129 

from memory by the steady flow of experience. Thought 
cannot take the place of sensation, conning over its acqui- 
sitions, and making use of them in a higher, more inde- 
pendent and spiritual habit of mind. Hence we find that 
animals soon reach limits beyond which they can not be 
pushed. 

An argument of more weight even than these, is that 
involved in language. Language is peculiar to man. 
Animals convey vocally and otherwise their present feel- 
ings and states to each other, but this fact hardly modifies 
the above assertion, and does not affect our argument. 
Language, as a transfer of ideas, not of present, concrete 
states ; as a use of articulate, conventional sounds for the 
imparting of thought, is universally wanting in animals, 
and this in spite of constant intercourse with man, in spite 
of his most patient efforts to impart language, and, in some 
instances at least, in spite of a physical structure capable 
of its easy reception. The reason of this seems to us sim- 
ple and conclusive. It is the lack of intuitions, a lack of 
those powers whose exercise calls for language. Our 
abstract ideas are of two kinds, those directly given by our 
intuitive constitution, and those generalizations indirectly 
dependent thereon. The idea of space is already involved in 
the recognition of definite cases of extension, and may, at 
any fitting moment in rational growth, call for a designation. 
The idea expressed by the word, sweetness, involves com- 
parison, and, incident thereto, the separation of one quality 
from groups of different qualities. But comparison pro- 
ceeds under the intuitive idea of resemblance. Without this 
we should not have opened the comparison, nor intellect- 
ually have distinguished the single quality. Thus is it with 
such an idea as that of utility. A given relation of things 
to our enjoyments is discriminated from other relations, 
and the word applied wherever it exists. So objects that 
6* 



130 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

are distant, events that are past, qualities or relations that 
are like or unlike come before the mind for its discernment, 
because of intuitive ideas or categories under which these 
distinctions fall. Hence, through his intuitions, man has 
constant occasion for language as an instrument of thought. 
Qualities, states, relations, not separable in the senses, or 
not even present to them, are made objects of considera- 
tion, and require a word, a word by which they can be de- 
signated, and held fast by the mind contemplating them, 
and transferred to other minds. Herein is a mental, con- 
stitutional demand for language. So certain is this de- 
mand to supply itself, that language springs up at once 
between rational beings. A nature like man's is a guar- 
antee for the origin and growth of language, for a gathering 
together of those natural signs and primitive sounds by 
which complex present states are expressed, and a speedy 
development of them — through successive steps of abstrac- 
tion, into language. If we accept in addition to these in- 
tellectual powers, this constitutional tendency always push- 
ing in one direction, in addition to the physical organs 
which complement them and make easy their development, 
a belief in a direct, vocal communion of primitive man 
with God, or the Angel of God, the problem of language 
is made comparatively simple. 

The roots of speech were given in speech, and by a 
movement spontaneous and necessary developed into 
language. The forces innate in the intellectual, social, 
physical constitution of man seem to us sufficient to 
secure a spontaneous development in speech. This growth 
will take the easiest of the ways open to it, and expand 
old roots, when these are at hand, instead of establishing 
new ones. Yet that a linguistic root, that is a sound that 
comes to secure a definite power of expression, is within 
the scope of intellectual beings, impelled to impart to 



MAN. I3I 

each other their impressions, can hardly be doubted. That 
development at once begins to exclude invention is no 
proof against invention, that invention which is half-in- 
stinctive. 

In the animal are found none of those intellectual 
conditions which are the essential, genetic forces of lan- 
guage. He deals at once with concrete, complex, present 
objects, or with these held in the simplest way in memory. 
If it were otherwise ; if he began the process of abstrac- 
tion, of separation of qualities, of relations in time, place, 
causation, there would be present a tendency which would 
constrain him hastily to lay hold of language when offered 
him, or slowly to shape it for himself as the necessary 
instrument of thought and expression. A deep constitu- 
tional instinct or longing cannot be habitually baffled. 
The having to do directly with objects ; the fastening of 
consideration exclusively on concrete states of sensation, 
or rather the allowing these in a direct, automatic way to 
work out their results, are the distinguishing features of 
animal life, features that are connected with the lack of 
intuitions, and which give no occasion for language. 

When provision is made by the animal for the future as 
future, we refer the act, as the storing of his nuts in his 
nest by the squirrel, to instinct. This immediate hinging 
of action on sensations, appetites, organic impressions, 
states that stand in direct, automatic connection with the 
conduct that flows from them, few will deny ; and it is a 
fact most important in the explanations it offers of our 
intellectual constitution. The mental powers of the brute 
serve rather to thread together his passing experience, 
than either to displace them or modify them by those re- 
mote, ideal ends that turn on insight. He is not under, nor 
can he be brought under, the government of ideas. Sensa- 
tions and affiliated impressions are his controlling forces. 



132 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

When we add to these considerations the sudden en- 
largement of the brain of man, putting him quite out of 
the range of the most favored animal life, and so the new 
relation of the cerebrum to subordinate ganglia, we make 
out a case that must be met by the most positive proof. 
Higher spiritual powers can not be carelessly assumed in 
behalf of the animal. The intuitions remain for us the 
title-page of a totally new volume, one of revelation, one 
wherein life and immortality are brought to light, one that 
discloses us open-eyed and large-hearted sitting at the feet 
of Christ. 

The sense of shame which a dog manifests, the satis- 
faction he takes in approval, and the quickness with which 
he feels censure, only disclose his close observation of the 
states of his master, and his -active response to them. 
There falls upon him the shadow of a higher moral nature, 
and he is conscious of it in its heat and cold, no farther. 
He can set up no standard, and institute no action, other- 
wise than in sympathetic response to the will and pleasure 
of man, and in obedience to his own faithful attachments. 
This is a long way off from morality, though it may be 
practically better than conduct which boasts of the moral 
element. The happy hits of the parrot, its apt repetition 
of phrases, may startle us, but when we look up at the 
wise bird with its wicked eye it can go no farther, but re- 
volves its familiar phrases, its wheel of foolish wit, waiting 
the recurrence of another lucky stroke. 

The intuitions which are central in character, and so 
of supreme moment in religion, are right and liberty. 
The power above all others which constitutes personality 
is that of choice ; from this issues rational action, in its 
final self-sufficient strength. The law of this freedom, 
which at once calls for it and makes it possible, is right. 
We do not wish to enter on a complete discussion of either 



MAN. I33 

of these intuitions, but only to give them the explanation, 
support and application requisite in making clear their 
relations to religion. 

Liberty turns on the relation of motives, impulses to 
choice, action ; not on the relation of action to volition. 
By motives we mean the entire hold of persuasives on the 
mind, whether arising from external inducements or internal 
states. A motive involves a relation between outside and 
inside conditions, by which the one appeals to the other, is 
a power in reference to it. If liberty is the physical free- 
dom which allows the proposed conduct to follow on the 
choice, then there is no question for discussion. None 
will deny that physical restraint is an infringement of 
liberty, and all should admit that the untied horse, the 
loosened stone on the hillside, are free in essentially the 
same sense as man is free ; that is, each is at liberty to 
obey interior tendencies without external constraint. 
There is no sufficient ground on which to distinguish 
freedom in man from freedom in the detached rock 
found in the fact, that the inner impulse arises in the one 
case from gravitation and in the other from desire. The 
question of freedom is settled by the manner in which the 
forces at work operate, not by their specific and secondary 
characteristics. Is the action of the desire, the motive, 
absolute, certain ? If so, it constitutes an impelling force, 
in its essential nature, one of causation, like gravitation, or 
the push of an engine. 

Certainty and necessity are the words by which many 
have chosen to designate the kind of connection due 
respectively to moral and physical forces. If by certainty 
is meant certainty, absolute, complete certainty, a certainty 
capable of prediction, then there would seem to be no dif- 
ference between it and necessity, assuredly not for the 
purposes of our discussion. Like the words, moral neces- 



134 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

sity and physical necessity ; certainty and necessity would 
merely indicate the same kind of union between different 
factors. Necessity is necessity whether it is looked for in 
the relation of action to desire, or in the dependence of a 
ball on the bat that drives it. Certainty that has in it an 
absolute, a demonstrable element, must arise from the 
fixed, necessary hold which the agents at work have on 
the action that is to follow from them. Unless there is 
an inexorable grasp in the motive, an efficiency which then 
and there sets evasion out of the question, there is no cer- 
tainty, only probability. We deny certainty and necessity 
alike as belonging to free action. There is no important 
distinction between them. The use of the two words has 
the effect to obscure the question, to make and obliterate 
a difference in the same breath, to affirm a distinction and 
yet to give it no intelligible basis. Let the question be 
nakedly and fairly stated, that it may be answered on its 
own merits. 

The connection of the motive with the will is one nei- 
ther of necessity nor chance ; it is one of choice. If 
necessity and chance divide between them the possible 
connections of action, then there can be no liberty, and 
we accept necessity as the only wholesome branch of the 
alternative. We do not believe that they do. There are 
necessary, and there are free actions ; chance events there 
are none. Chance is the denial alike of freedom and ne- 
cessity, and is excluded from the possible connections of a 
creation. It is the conception which the mind opposes 
to creation, and then only in a limited form. Choice is 
restricted to certain lines of action open to it ; the will is 
susceptible to the influence of motives ; the influence of 
motives is not of a necessary, determining character ; the 
final efficiency from which conduct issues is the spontaneity 
of the mind expressed in volition ; these we regard as the 



MAN. I35 

essential facts of freedom, clear enough in themselves, and 
only liable to become obscure when the mind comes to the 
contemplation of them from a protracted study of physi- 
cal forces, obedient to quite another law. The scientific 
connection, established by an ever-increasing variety of 
facts ; confirmed by signal triumphs of interpretation ; sim- 
ple, direct, universal in its own field, is brought with great 
confidence to mental phenomena, is easily applied to them 
in their connection with physical forces, and is then rapidly 
extended through the higher and alien field of pure thought 
and volition. True spiritual connections are ruled out as 
foreign to science, because foreign to its previous inquiries. 
A new department is entered with no new induction, or 
sufficient recognition of the independent principles which 
belong to it. 

If this is not the true view of volition, if the will is in 
any, the most subtile, way controlled by its conditions, 
then there is properly no choice, no volition, nor an occa- 
sion for any. The given action is simply a resolution of 
two or more conflicting impulses into a result which ex- 
presses their relation to each other ; it is the diagonal 
which follows from an interaction of forces which can not 
be each separately obeyed. The more sensitive, precise 
and automatic the organic mechanism of body and mind 
is, under these various persuasives, the better. The ani- 
mal structure that most rapidly settles the controversy, that 
analyzes it instantly into a resultant, presents the most 
happy conformation. Vacillation, deliberation, an inability 
to determine the balance of forces, a partial obedience in 
succession of one and another, are all unfortunate, all 
betray the weakness of a machine lacking delicate, instant 
movement, unable quite to estimate the things submitted 
to it. As there is no room for choice, what is wanted is a 
quick, exact interplay of impulses, deciding by actual ten- 



136 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

sion among themselves their respective claims. The 
power of the motive is to be known, like the weight of 
elements, by the scales. Motives may depend for their 
presence on investigation, an investigation, however, as 
automatic as an appetite, but they settle and unite them- 
selves among themselves by actual, operative force. There 
is no volition, we apply the word concessively to this silent 
adjustment of intellectual forces among themselves. The 
motives yield the impulses, and the sensitive mechanism 
harmonizes and combines them in action. A most apt 
image of the organic mental structure would be that 
machine which in the royal mint tests the sovereigns, and 
rapidly sets aside the fraudulent ones as they pass its 
point of poise. 

It would seem to follow that the unconscious is to be 
preferred to the conscious resolution, the instinctive, to 
the intelligent settlement, since, while both are equally 
automatic, the former is more decisive and certain. 
Deliberation is delay, doubt is uncertainty, consideration 
is hesitancy and sluggishness among efficient forces. It 
would also seem to fairly follow under this view, that as 
each motive is, in reference to the mind, a definite force, it 
is impossible for the mind ever to reject one of two con- 
flicting motives, but must always combine them ; the two 
should disclose themselves either by addition, subtraction, 
or composition in the resultant action, or our favorite 
axiom, the conservation of forces, fails us. The inferior 
mechanical force can never be escaped. It impresses the 
product according to its direction and measure, precisely 
as does the superior one. Men should move along diago- 
nals only, since subject so habitually to composite forces. 
it is a marvellous result in moral mechanics that a moral 
influence rejected seems to add itself as an impulse in the 
opposite direction. 



MAX. 137 

Losing spontaneity in this presentation of the will, we 
lose it also m the divine nature, and thereby miss a begin- 
ning, miss potentiality. If, in the human will, we find only 
a transfer of forces, it is with this idea that we must go up 
to the conception of the Divine Being. If God is capable 
of another freedom, of true origination, then no intrinsic 
difficulty, or absurdity in the notion itself, forbids our ex- 
tension of it to man. If such an absurdity bars us in our 
interpretation of human choice, it remains with us when 
we frame our conception of the divine will. Hence it 
would follow that God only expresses in his action the 
forces within and without operative on him. There is 
with him no origination. God and the universe are each 
instant realized forces in certain stages of transition. If 
any thing is for a moment held in the bosom of God, it is 
so as a settled, determinate force, in one phase of transfer. 
Potentiality is taken away, as potentiality implies a power 
to do more or less than a given amount ; but our funda- 
mental conception now is, that every set of circumstances, 
though they include persons as well as things, contain fixed 
causes, and these only. Nor can we, denying spontaneity 
in the will, restore it in the intellect. The proof is weaker 
at this point than at the other, and the same difficulties pre- 
cisely attend upon it. Having lost liberty itself, we have 
small motive to retain its useless foundations in the spon- 
taneity of thought. Intellectual action, like voluntary 
action, so-called, will be left a necessary product of condi- 
tions now fixed, fixed also in each previous and subsequent 
moment. The Deity settles to the level of the universe, 
and the universe includes him, not he it ; unless we choose 
to take refuge in pantheism, and identify the two, and 
so save the less in the larger, God in creation. The 
river of events is without fountains ; it flows from beneath 
the cold, misty past as a stream that gushes from under a 



I38 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

glacier, itself a sinuous, creeping, tumbling torrent. Ma- 
terialism, and a spiritualism that overlooks or cripples or 
denies its fundamental idea, that of liberty, both reach the 
same conclusion. Much of the extreme orthodoxy of our 
time is far along in intrinsic tendencies toward materialism 
and pantheism. Let it once be consistent with itself, and 
the issue is inevitable. In saying this, we of course speak 
only of systems, not of persons. 

The recent work of Dr. Hodge, on Systematic The- 
ology, takes the view of liberty which regards it not as 
dependent on the will, the nature of choice, but simply on 
the relation of conduct to the will? on freedom to follow 
the choice. Many of the worst deductions of this doctrine 
consequently attach to his presentation. Some of them we 
may have occasion to notice 'hereafter. We wish now to 
glance, at the difficulties he finds in choice as a sponta- 
neous, self-sufficient act. We do this the more willingly 
as the author is so able, so sincere, so representative a 
man, and presents in their best form objections derived 
from scriptural interpretations which very many make in 
common with him. What science does on one wing, or- 
thodoxy does on the other, and they inclose, beat up and 
pursue liberty between them, waging a common war. 

The portion of the work containing the discussion 
referred to is the ninth chapter of the second part, and is 
found in the second volume. His first objection, unfolded 
at large, is completely involved in these words " To deny 
free agency to God would be to deny him personality. . 
And yet in all the universe is there anything so certain as 
that God will do right? . . Does he — the advocate of 
freedom — deny that the saints in glory are free, or does he 
deny the absolute certainty of their perseverance in holi- 
ness ? " The whole force of this reasoning is found in the 
effort to identify the highest probable or moral evidence 



MAN. I39 

with demonstration, and pronounce the one the logical 
equivalent of ,the other. It is the will of God, his volun- 
tary character, that makes the holiness of God to be 
holiness, and will cause it to remain holiness so long as it 
expresses his choice. We are content to allow to its 
continuance every degree of certainty which does not 
destroy its nature, does not remove its seat from the will, 
does not settle it in fixed connections under the play of 
constitutional, automatic causes. We can not for the sake 
of certainty, demonstrative proof, accept the most skillfully 
constructed automaton in place of God. We do deny then 
" the absolute certainty " of continued holiness in God and 
the angelic host, in this sense, that there are sufficient con- 
straining forces, aside from choice to secure it ; we accept 
the certainty of it in this sense, that they have, by their own 
voluntary action and rational insight, beyond all fear and 
doubt, committed themselves to the law of righteousness. 
There is here the highest moral proof, but no demonstra- 
tion, no necessity, resting on fixed, blind forces. To apply 
adjectives which belong to demonstration, to moral evi- 
dence, and to seek to obliterate or obscure their logical 
difference, is a method more popular than philosophical. 
Holiness remains forever, with all alike, a thing of choice ; 
if it should cease to be this, it would cease to be holiness. 
In altering our conception of the nature of choice, we there- 
with necessarily modify our conception of holiness. The 
choice which Dr. Hodges concedes yields for us no right- 
eousness, and he has not so much made absolute and 
eternal the righteousness of Heaven as destroyed it 
altogether. Between the highest moral evidence and 
demonstration the difference lies not in our degree of 
repose in them respectively, but in the kind of connection 
between the premises and the conclusion. Practically, at 
indefinite distances, it makes no difference whether we are 



140 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

on the asymptote or on the curve, theoretically the distinc- 
tion remains good forever. We have not so- read through 
and through the will of God, or of the least of his servants, 
as to be able to affirm a necessary connection between any 
motives and the conduct that flows from them. The truly 
living nexus in holiness is the unsearchable one of choice. 

It may seem irreverent to deny the absolute certainty 
of the holiness of God, and advantage may be taken of this 
against the libertarian. Yet this impression is a very falla- 
cious one. Certainly, God would not be honored by affirm- 
ing of his action a necessity which would ally it to physi- 
cal causation. The certainty of action which honors God 
is that which arises from his conduct as in complete de- 
pendence on his choice, granting to choice its own large 
nature. What that nature is, is not to be decided by a 
show of reverence on the one side or the other. True 
reverence is found in a careful inquiry into the conditions 
of choice, both in man and in God, and in allowing to free- 
dom its full scope in him as in us. As a retort it is suffi- 
cient to say, when accused of denying the certainty of holi- 
ness in God, that to affirm the necessity of holiness in God 
is to take it away altogether. The true answer we appre- 
hend to be, that we ought first to inquire into the nature 
of liberty, and then to refer that liberty fearlessly to God. 
Investigation is not to be arrested by results embarrassing 
to preconceived opinions ; it is for the sake of corrections 
that we undertake the work. 

The second objection is found in the doctrines of fore- 
knowledge, fore-ordination, divine providence and effectual 
calling. The theologian is as busy as the scientist in bind- 
ing man hand and foot, and passing him over to some form 
of fate, though the stubborn demiurge is in the one case, 
God ; and in the other, nature. We accept the difficulty, if 
it be a difficulty and not rather a proof. Human nature is a 



MAN. I41 

fact which comes before the Bible, as does the physical 
universe, and with the same defining force. That nature 
is to be learned in its powers and laws, and the Scriptures 
are to be understood as addressed to a being so endowed, 
as finding their subject, not making him. The word is to 
be interpreted by the character of the creature to whom it 
is spoken, not this character by that word. We learn the 
facts of astronomy, of geology, and explain the language 
of the Bible in consistency with them. To pursue an oppo- 
site course leads to endless misapprehension and unbelief. 
The same principle with the same force is involved in con- 
nection with man. The Scriptures no more teach philoso- 
phy than they do science. They presuppose the one as 
they do the other. No fact either in science or philoso- 
phy can be established by Scriptural interpretation as 
against sufficient proof found in the department itself. 
This position will come up for fuller discussion in connec- 
tion with inspiration, and the office of revealed truth. 

That measure of fore-knowledge which is possible under 
freedom, we attribute to God, and no more. Not to fore- 
know what is impossible to be foreknown, or not to know 
absolutely what, from its nature, is contingent, is not dis- 
paraging to wisdom, for it is not open to wisdom. That 
human action admits of high estimates of probability, is 
sufficiently plain from our own daily anticipations. 

The providence and government of God can not be em- 
barrassed by the freedom of man. We can hardly suppose 
him to confer a power which he can not easily and safely 
handle. He presents to man the alternatives involved in 
choice, and shapes them to his own purposes. The real 
disparagement would lie in supposing God to withhold 
liberty, lest it should get beyond his control. Much, we 
believe, does find entrance into the world on account of 
human freedom which would otherwise be excluded. We 



142 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. ' 

are glad to cut short God's fore-ordination along the lines of 
man's responsibility. If God's will carries over and be- 
yond them, if he works with personal choice and efficiency 
through the transgressor, then he adopts and makes his 
own the transgression. For us at least, it becomes his 
sin and his only. No being can wrap his wish and effort 
around an action without sharing its moral character; no 
supreme being can do this in reference to the acts of a 
creature without drawing up into himself the entire guilt. 
Let the doctrine of effectual calling fail. We are not ready 
to say of this dogma, nor of any other dogma, this first, and 
the fundamental facts of philosophy afterward. Nor is the 
rejection of this belief a loss, but a relief. If God can ef- 
fectually call every man by motives, and under conditions, 
in themselves worthy, we are utterly at a loss to under- 
stand why he does not call them all. The glory of God 
to be obtained by the loss of men in sin and from holi- 
ness, who could have been saved by his direct, legitimate 
call, is a moral enigma than which there is none greater. 
Every other difficulty is secondary compared with this, 
which strikes centrewise at the character of God, at the 
honor and reverence we render him. Between a moral and 
an intellectual or governmental limitation, we must always 
accept the latter as falling to God. A plan, including the 
elements of freedom and growth, does bring restrictions ; 
it is the nature of all order to do so. These restrictions 
are a positive relief to our thought, for they shelter the 
moral character of God. 

Again we urge, the philosophical question antedates 
the theological one, and must be decided independently 
of it. Man is, and has been from the beginning, a certain 
kind of being ; what kind, is a question for fair inquiry, 
aside from Revelation. Once decided, it will affect our 
apprehension of the government exercised over him. By 



MAN. 143 

these previous conditioning facts the methods of Heaver, 
are to be interpreted, since they are directly fitted to them. 
The facts first, and the Scriptures in their relation to them 
is the order of inquiry. As a retort, we need only say to 
the present objection, the Scriptures fully and repeat- 
edly recognize man's liberty. These passages call for 
another exegesis. The question of liberty is thrown back 
upon us by the Scriptures themselves for our settlement. 
If passages are to be marshaled by their first force, we 
have at least as large a following as our opponents. Our 
true answer is, we have a right to go to philosophy to set- 
tle questions antecedent to theology and conditioning it. 
Whether God's government shall seem to us an inflexible 
congeries of decrees, or law tempered by persuasion and 
softened by love, will depend on our estimates of man. 

The third objection is drawn from the author's inter- 
pretation of consciousness. Here nothing is to be claimed 
or conceded. Liberty is not a fact yielded directly in 
consciousness, nor one, on the other hand, that can be 
denied on the ground of consciousness. If we were 
directly conscious of liberty, there would be no opportu- 
nity for discussion. No man denies thought and feeling as 
simple facts, or if he does, no one listens to him. Free- 
dom is a question not of facts, but of the nature of the con- 
nection between facts, between states of mind and the acts 
which follow from them, between motives and choices. This, 
consciousness can not directly pronounce upon, since it 
does not reach to it, since it renders phenomena and not 
sub-phenomenal connections. The character of this de- 
pendence is to be decided by that rational intuition which 
yields relations. In view of responsibity, pressed by the 
moral incentives, the reason does affirm and enforce 
freedom as the only sufficient explanation of the facts. 
The generality and constancy of this conviction are, as of 



144 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

every idea, its proof. We make no appeal, and we can 
allow no appeal, to consciousness on this question. It has 
nothing directly to say concerning either spontaneity or 
liberty. The most that can be said is, consciousness does 
not contradict our philosophy. The philosophy itself rests 
upon the aptness of the interpretation it furnishes. 

The fourth objection springs from a misconstruction of 
the doctrine of liberty, and a deeper misconception of the 
seat of responsibility. " It is obvious that if the will be 
self-determined, independent of the previous state of the 
mind, it has no more character than the outward act 
detached from the volition — it does not reveal or express 
anything in the mind. . . Man is responsible for his 
volitions, because they are determined by his principles 
and feelings ; he is responsible for his principles and feel- 
ings because of their inherent nature as good or bad ; and 
because they are his own, and constitute his character." 
The misstatement is this. The will is represented as 
acting, according to the view censured, independently of 
the motives ; it should rather be regarded as choosing or 
adopting the motives, and thereby taking to itself their 
nature, evoking the moral element incident to motives and 
will in conjoint action. The misconception of responsi- 
bility is this placing it in the desires, feelings, affections, 
aside from their adoption by the will. The rattlesnake is 
as moral a being as the dove, the lion as the lamb, for 
neither are moral. One in stern conflict with perverse 
appetites may be fighting his way up the precipitous paths 
of virtue ; another, gifted with moderate appetites and 
mild passions, may be gently descending the sunny slopes 
of dalliance. There is no moral character in the affec- 
tions, aside from their dependence, direct and indirect, on 
the choices. The will is the centre and pivot of manhood. 
We need no more than to state these distinctions to 



MAN. I45 

establish them. If one will not so accept them, he will 
scarcely allow them at all. 

The fifth holds so closely by the fourth objection, as 
hardly to call for a distinct answer. " The doctrine that 
the will is determined and not self-determined is, moreover, 
involved in the rational character of our acts. A rational 
act is not merely an act performed by a rational being, but 
one performed for a reason, whether good or bad. An 
act performed without a reason, without intention or 
object, for which no reason can be assigned beyond the 
mere power of acting, is as irrational as the actions of a 
brute or an idiot." It is a little unkind to object to the 
actions of a brute or an idiot as irrational on the ground 
of no fixed connection in them between the incentive and. 
the exertion. What is the distinction between these acts 
and those of a man but this very one, that the forces im- 
pelling effort are, in the one case, necessary, automatic, 
the most efficient of reasons, even causes ; and, in the 
other, are held aloof by the mind till it can choose between 
them. Idiotic and brute conduct affords the best illustra- 
tion of determined action, of action controlled by its so- 
called reasons ; and if rationality turns on this feature, 
these deeds should be held up as peculiarly rational. 
There is no distinction between causes and reasons unless 
we make it by the introduction of liberty. A motive is a 
reason when the mind adopts it ; it is a cause, such a force 
as falls to brutes and idiots, when it adopts the mind, 
takes hold of it with controlling power. 

In the sixth objection the same phase of thought 
receives another presentation. " The axiom that every 
effect must have a cause, or the doctrine of a sufficient 
reason, applies to the internal as well as to the external 
world. . . To refer us simply to his, man's, efficiency 
is to leave the demand for a sufficient reason entirely 
7 



146 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

unsatisfied ; in other words, it is to assume that there may- 
be an effect without a cause ; which is impossible." This 
objection has the merit of striking to the root of the 
matter; it turns impliedly on the assertion, that there 
are no reasons that are not causes, that the causal relation 
covers every relation of dependence between successive 
states or events. In this statement the author would find 
very many quite beyond his pale of belief to sympathize 
with him ; some indeed whom he would perchance be 
willing to call unbelievers ; and whose unbelief is rested 
on this very proposition. Every materialist will start up 
and say, Yes, to this central dogma on which a professedly 
Scriptural creed is made to rest. We also draw attention 
to the fact that this statement identifies, as the author in 
consistency ought to identify, certainty and necessity ; 
both are connections between causes and effects. Before 
making answer to this objection, we will volunteer a little 
support of it taken from Tylor. It is a pleasant spectacle 
to see two men shake hands across so deep a chasm. It 
would seem, however, that one or other must be mistaken 
in the bearings of so fundamental a principle. We antici- 
pate censure for a want of orthodoxy. Perhaps it may 
provoke a little charity, if we question the right of those 
to throw the first stone who stand in fundamental state- 
ments side by side with the prevalent unbelief of the day. 
We make no point of this ; we wish to go, and we wish 
that others should go, where the truth seems to carry them. 
A good deal of bigotry may be ascribed to the fact, that 
men face so boldly in one direction, that they forget what 
is behind them ; look so sharply lest they slip on the de- 
clivity to the right, that they are ready to fall sheer over 
the precipice to the left. 

"The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more 
toward the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is every 



MAN. 147 

where." * " Here as elsewhere, causeless spontaneity 
is seen to recede farther and farther into shelter within 
the dark precincts of ignorance, like chance that still holds 
its place among the vulgar as a real cause of events other- 
wise unaccountable, while to educated men it has long 
meant nothing but this ignorance itself."! "The popu- 
lar notion of free human will involves not only freedom to 
act in accordance with motives, but also a power of break- 
ing loose from continuity and acting without cause — a com- 
bination which may be roughly illustrated by the simile of 
a balance sometimes acting in the usual way, but also pos- 
sessed of the faculty of turning itself without or against its 
weights.''$ 

These writers, far apart in general beliefs, unite in the 
accusation against liberty, that it denies causation, and is 
made thereby unscientific and absurd. Causation and 
chance for them cover the field, and they can not hesitate 
between them. To the libertarian freedom is not chance ; 
spontaneity and causation stand in rival ownership, and to 
do an action freely is to perform it under a fresh power in- 
stead of a transmitted one. The question between the two 
parties is really this, Can there be a beginning? Can 
action be initiated ? The one answers, Undoubtedly, and 
so makes way for religion. The odier says with equal 
confidence, Certainly not, and so excludes creation and 
modification ; sweeps away the foundations of faith in 
removing those of personal, moral power. 

These differences are so ultimate that argument can go 
no farther than to bring the mind clearly face to face with 
them. They are to be decided by our intuitions, and 
we can only give our intuitive reason the best outlook, 
the most commanding survey of the field, and wait for its 

* Primitive Culture, p. 20. 
f Ibid, p. 17. \ Ibid, p. 2. 



148 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

sentence. Accept clearly and unwaveringly the view, that 
no event is without a cause, a transmitted force that then 
and there secures it, and what follows ? That a man may 
be censurable for doing what he could not but do ; that he 
may be censurable for not doing what he could not do — 
and if to any extent, why not to all extents ? If he was 
guilty for not doing the act of kindness which he could not 
do, why not guilty for not making the earth to be Heaven, 
though he could not do it ? I could not, is no bar to judg- 
ment. If the criminal had acted otherwise, the whole order 
of the universe would have been subverted, his conduct 
would have been a fortuity, an absurdity, that of a "brute 
and idiot," yet guilt in his own and every man's opinion 
attaches to his action ; we beg leave to ask, Why ? The 
action of the animal in depredating, in taking the life of 
its fellow, on this view, is precisely that of man in doing 
the same things. When we rebuke a man for wrong action, 
we avail ourselves of an absurd impression of liberty and 
responsibility that lingers in his mind ; and if he repeats 
the deed, it is because we did not attach sufficient reproof 
or punishment to his conduct to enable him, by the new 
forces thus set in play upon him, to correct his behavior. 
We are to look upon the criminal in all cases as a given 
combination of malign forces, and to strive to overmaster it 
by sufficient corrective forces. To bestow inadequate 
rebuke is as inefficacious and unwise as to pour one pail 
of water on a fire that requires two to extinguish it. 

Add to these absurdities the further absurdity that we, 
the agents in the supposed correction, are no more free 
than the criminal, and proportion our rebukes and punish- 
ment under a necessary impulse, — and we may as well say 
a blind impulse, for of what use is an apprehension which 
is itself fixed in its quantity, and fixed in its dependencies, 
which is controlled by, and does not control, the condi- 



MAN. 149 

tions under which it arises — and we see that no moral 
influences, agencies can be worked by such a theory, no 
moral conduct be shaped by it. We do assume, and must 
assume, liberty as the condition of responsibility, and lib- 
erty of so deep a nature as to give the control of action in 
its very seats and sources. We constantly regard censure 
as something deserved, whose efficiency is due to this sense 
of desert, and measurable by quite another criterion than 
that of tone or threatening emphasis. Put the question 
plainly, unequivocally to our intuitions, in view of our 
responsibilities, and the answer comes distinctly and con- 
stantly in favor of freedom. Philosophy fails to obscure 
the truth except for a moment, and from a single point. 
Under injury no man ever resists the assertions of his 
moral nature. 

The necessity of causation is forced upon us only when, 
losing sight of personal features, conduct is graded down 
to a series of physical events, and their connection is sought 
after on this low plane of thought. How impossible it is to 
completely accept and apply the theory of necessity is seen 
in the following quotation from Tylor, taken from the same 
chapter in which he broaches his opinion on this subject. 
" There are various topics, especially in history, law, phi- 
losophy and theology, where even the educated people we 
live among can hardly be brought to see, that the cause 
why men do hold an opinion, or practice a custom, is by 
no means necessarily a reason why they ought to do so." * 
How is this, a sufficient cause, not a sufficient reason ! 
"Ought" then the balance to descend otherwise than it 
does descend ! What language have we here, is it sense 
or nonsense that underlies it ? 

It is proof against both Dr. Hodge and Mr. Tylor, that 
they do not state wisely, or even fairly, the doctrine they 
* Primitive Culture, p. 12. 



150 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

controvert. The libertarian does not hold, or need not hold, 
that the will is disconnected from the motive, but only 
that the motive — and the motive as contrasted with other 
motives — has no definite, physical force by which it can 
add and subtract itself among the conditions of action. 
The will is limited to the motives before it, does feel them 
as motives, does take one or another of them by its own, 
not by its, potency, and thereby wins character. 

We hold fast in liberty, and thus in power, and thus in 
duty, and thus in promise and in hope. The world has its 
fortunes given to it, and when they come they lie as a mere 
garment over it ; it knows not of them. We carry our for- 
tunes with us ; we gather on board our resources, and launch 
forth in our quest. When our discoveries and triumphs are 
achieved, they are present with a power on our part to know, 
to enjoy, to enlarge them. Noble effort, enthusiasm from 
the beginning, have been born of the sense of power. The 
glory of achievement, the patience of faith, the strength of 
courage, the serenity of virtue, the thirst of every living 
soul, quenched or quenchless, are found in liberty. Here, on 
this pivot of power, revolves all that makes us far-reaching, 
immortal ; or immortality of worth to us. Liberty can 
grow, and covets these blank years in which to grow, inte- 
grating each on-coming period into a nobler life. Causation 
perishes, and may as well perish, at every transition, leav- 
ing its indifferent, electionless forces to rise in a new pro- 
duct, to rise and sink with each wave of evolution. 

If it were true of liberty, that it must needs be a 
chance-force, acting from nothing toward nothing, playing 
no part in God's universe but one of confusion, misunder- 
standing and ignorance, the objections made against it 
might well hold. Liberty must be seen to spring from the 
spontaneous intellectual powers of man, and be coupled 
with its supplementary perception, that of right, before the 



MAN. 151 

two can be yoked to the chariot of the morning, and bring 
forward a new spiritual creation. That insight of the soul, 
that straight-forward, far-reaching vision by which lines of 
duty, obligation, opportunity, of sympathetic, creative 
mastery over events, are seen to radiate deep into life, to lie 
vanishing, on the vanishing outlines of the future ; that 
single, searching eye of the soul, must be seen to be in 
man, before we have a service for freedom, and can under- 
stand the awakening power with which it responds to an 
opportunity, and goes forth to fulfill a destiny, that human 
destiny which is found in casting off successively the en- 
folding conditions of growth. The penetration, the com- 
prehension, the vision of the soul centre in the moral 
reason, in the conscience, in that final intuition that leaves 
the unmistakable seal of obligation on the least and the 
lowest of its renderings of life. In no other activity do all 
powers so concur, so converge. Experience, reflection, 
observation, pains-taking deduction, wise theory and 
patient practice, all yield the light by which this organ of 
comprehension sees ; yet it it is that sees, not these ; it 
that turns counsel into command. The whole life of man, 
physical, social, intellectual, with every shade of coloring 
upon it, in its deformities and beauties, its actualities and 
possibilities, is that which is seen, and that on which the 
lines of growth are slowly drawn. Entirety, more and 
more completeness, permeating, shaping, guiding power 
come of this vision of the mind, a vision passing into duty. 
It discovers " the fitness of things," "the truth of things," 
" the greatest good of the greatest number," that which 
" is worthy of the human soul," " blessedness "jit brings 
to light the long-hidden plan of God, disclosing the won- 
derful variety and richness and wisdom of his giving, a 
giving locked up in the germinant powers of a holy life, 
and then includes them all in the law of the soul, its 



1 52 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

rectitude, its right. Our highest emotional nature lends 
itself to this insight. Only as we feel do we know deeply, 
know a spiritual truth, a spiritual relation and promise. 
The lights and shades of the understanding are by the 
enlivened affections warmed into glowing colors, changea- 
ble, ethereal, as real as those that play on morning clouds 
and hill-tops. Know God's spiritual universe without the 
pure, deep colors of a spiritual atmosphere shed upon it, 
shifting with it as the beams of his wisdom and grace go 
on their way ! Know, then, this material world in 'the 
workshop and the crucible alone, and see not its fellowship 
with the light as in mountain solitudes, morning and even- 
ing, it holds communion with heaven. 

The first simple imperatives of conscience may not 
seem to have much significance, to hold much in reserve, 
but one command is interlocked with the next and leads 
to it, one measure of insight is the condition of a succeeding 
one. Wherever we are found, this teacher takes us up 
with a duty. The farther we pursue the duty, the more it 
becomes a pleasure, diverges into other pleasures, and 
puts our feet at the beginning of new and broader paths. 
We of to-day, having learned much of the laws of life, 
reverence" them more deeply, are more ready to accept the 
familiar paths of obedience, to adopt them as they lie out- 
lined before us as also the ways of sagacious and far- 
reaching utility, and to pursue them henceforth, denying 
their ultimate obligation, but accepting their wisdom. 
Virtue is easily travestied in her instruction by mere 
sagacity, when a crowning eminence has been reached, 
and the rugged path behind lies justified to the very 
senses. But it is the obedient soul, the soul that strength- 
ens itself to obey, that first reaches a moral height, and 
drinks together the fresh inspiration of labor, of duty, and 
of love ; that is at once mastered by and masters its 



MAN. 153 

impulse, being fully able to surrender all and receive all, 
to win or wait the winning, as shall fall to it. There is no 
victory of moral power, no subjection of warring impulses, 
no last cast of the soul upon truth, in mere utility, in a 
comprehensive search after good, a good that must pre- 
sently gather up all pleasures, making payment as 
speedily as may be to the thrifty spiritual husbandry that 
has been expended for them. The order of spiritual 
growth has not been this, can not be this ; notoften a slow, 
wise way of cunning accretions, but often one of convulsive 
upheaval, of surrendering all and facing all in a forlorn 
hope. Virtue dismisses a thousand things close at hand, 
and seizes with all her strength, upon one remote and uncer- 
tain. Having sold all for the hidden treasure, the love of 
God, we find our wealth at length summed up in these 
heavenly terms : All these things shall be added unto you ; 
and the Jaw of our effort in these words; Whosoever will 
save his life, shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his life 
for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. 

The moral law presents very different views as we rise 
above it or sink beneath it, as we gain power to mount by 
it, or fall into the shadow of its great threatenings. But 
this law is never something removed from God, something 
from which we flee to God. It is God's outlook toward 
us, the highway which he has thrown up along which to 
lead us. All our consolations, encouragements, forgive- 
ness, our sense of divine help and favor, come to us as we 
struggle after obedience. There is no impersonality nor 
alienation in the law of God, the moral law. It is the 
counsel of our Father, the index finger by which he guides 
us, and makes us to discover the paths of blessing from 
which we are now so far off, by which we are so little capa- 
ble of profiting. The law alone is barren. God is in the 
law with his wisdom and love and personal presence to sus- 
7 * . 



154 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

tain it and animate us, and to crown obedience as a work 
and a joy, a fellowship with himself. 

The seat of this law is the individual conscience ; this 
is the Shekinah at which God holds intercourse with each 
of his creatures; this the tabernacle at which we draw 
near and worship. No commands that are not addressed 
directly or indirectly to the conscience can constitute a 
moral government, nor any government except one of in- 
terest or force. It is a perception of the fitness of the 
action, its intrinsic moral claim upon us, or of the right of 
the person w 7 ho lays it upon us to require it of us, that 
makes us parties to it, and inspires within us the feeling 
of accountability. Mere good to be gained or evil to be 
avoided, violence to be escaped or favor to be won, are 
prudential considerations, which may develop sagacity, call 
forth fox-like 'cunning or human wisdom, but have no hold 
upon our ethical nature. We may chafe under these lower 
motives, we may resent them as imposing the bondage of 
slaves, but we can not translate them into moral obligation, 
light them up with the dignity and scope of duty, unless we 
can, in some way, get back of them, and look upon patient, 
noble action under them as itself excellent, vindicating a 
claim for us to the independent and higher worth of well- 
doing. A command as a command subserves no spiritual 
purpose, except as it unseals the moral nature, and draws 
it out in an obedience, increasingly free, intelligent, de- 
lightful and comprehensive. The precepts of religion are 
what they are to us because they are transcriptions of the 
law written in the heart, and thus slowly restore this to 
legibility, and ready control. The rational, moral being 
finds himself through the command in possession of the 
counsel of Heaven, and so he, by obedience, is made a 
new or renewed creature. If there were not this deep 
answer of our nature to the will of God, if we could not see 



MAN. 155 

his ways to be wise and good, if they were not already 
implanted in our constitution, we could not be lifted toward 
him. We should be left to wait for what development 
might fall to us on the low line of our inherent powers. 
Any regeneration, re-creation would be a new creation, 
snapping the links of connection, and destroying identity, 
at least in the personal, moral element What new crea- 
tures God may make, we know not, but it is plain enough 
to observation that he makes no new men, that the seats 
and secrets of our lives are already with us. 

This necessity of moral perception as the basis of a 
moral precept, carries with it the impossibility of either 
reward or punishment, in any truly ethical sense, which 
does not spring from the soul's acceptance or rejection of 
its own recognized law, from thoughts that accuse or excuse 
the conduct before them. There may be a coarse feeding 
on physical comforts, but no sense of virtue, no desert, no 
growing power to understand and to receive good, no joy 
in divine favor, divine forgiveness or divine acceptance, 
nor renewed strength, without an ethical nature to cast us 
down under sin, and lift us up under obedience ; without 
a perception of the mercy that overlooks transgression, and 
the grace that quickens our powers to fulfill the law of 
our life. Those doctrines which regard the human heart 
as absolutely dead in sin take from it the power to be 
healed, since healing must turn on life, a life that at least 
is able to go so far as to bring penitence, and open the 
heart to forgiveness. 

So, too, punishment that is anything more than physical 
violence, can not take effect without a sense of guilt to sus- 
tain it, a secret acceptance of it by the criminal as deserved. 
Mere suffering is not edifying, quite the reverse. The eye 
that looks on must be able to trace in it the issue of moral 
forces, a declaration of principles, the outcome of living, 



156 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

creative, wisely ordained powers, or he is either disturbed 
and distressed by it, or made devilish by it. The difference 
between a martyr and an outcast lies at this point, a differ- 
ence which they both, and even the mob which hoots them, 
understand ; a difference put plainly forth by the dying 
thief. We receive the due reward of our deeds ; but this 
man has done nothing amiss. There is no more startling 
moral fact than that which martyrdom has so often pre- 
sented, the impossibility of driving any man from the 
defences of his innocence ; — the impotence of public sen- 
timent, private hate, and popular rage, when they attempt 
to crowd the weakest from their integrity. It is in this 
battle that one man puts ten thousand to flight. Tyranny 
is no other than this, a separation of punishment from 
■ guilt, and an authority rightfully constituted, and the ty- 
rant thereby becomes the criminal, for whose overthrow 
all things grow expectant. Reward and punishment are 
deeply seated in the soul, so deeply that they often reverse 
the effects of physical pleasure and suffering, and are the 
only medium by which these can ever pass over into bliss 
or misery, elevation or degradation. 

Scripture precepts abundantly recognize this coincident 
interpretation, this broadening out of law by our moral 
nature. They either make no effort to cover the field of 
conduct, or do it so concisely as to leave all the details of 
action to be made out by the moral nature in the light of a 
few principles, or of a single fundamental one. The ten 
commandments are barren and inadequate till filled up by 
the generous, lively affections of a moral nature. The one 
great injunction of love toward God, with its corollary of 
love toward man, is simply an indication of what should be 
the primary state of the soul, and leaves unindicated that 
complete structure of the life by which, on the one hand, 
it is to be won, and, on the other, expressed. The moral 



MAN. 157 

nature is not dispensed with, but put at work by this pre- 
cept. The commands of God's word might, nine-tenths 
of them, be lost, and yet be capable of speedy restoration 
by the spirit of those that should remain, and the funda- 
mental temper of the Gospel acting in a living way on our 
moral temper. So nine-tenths of the precepts of a larger 
life may remain to be added by the moral nature, as the 
grounds of the separate injunctions are seen by it. A 
Scripture precept is a taper conveniently located on our 
way, but is no substitute for the torch we bear with us, 
and whose flame is fed by a Christian conscience. Com- 
mands that lay hold of action in its details may be indef- 
initely multiplied, and yet leave those subject to them 
inadequately guided, unless the moral nature can stand 
each instant as the principal. Witness, the manifold enact- 
ments of civil and criminal law, and the barren obedience 
of one who aims merely to keep within them. A hundred 
precepts have not the scope of a single principle, and 
would be worth far less than they now are, did they not in 
so many instances, suggest the principle, and so quicken 
the moral nature. Scriptural commands are usually the 
special applications of general principles, and thus they 
both hold the central truth and scatter its light by the 
clear reflection of a particular case under it. Positive 
institutes, formal commands, more and more disappear 
from the w r ord of God as it advances in its work, and 
we are increasingly left to handle, shape, complete our 
own lives. 

The ritualistic law was thus made a semi-mechanical 
initiation of obedience, by which its pupils were slowly led 
to, and at length left at, the feet of Christ for pure spiritual 
instruction. The finality of the Gospel is that of the 
apostle, " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just. 



158 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any 
virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things." 
There is no right action taken, no just sentiment, no 
enlarged opinion, which does not, by its own force and 
worth, belong to us as Christians. The Christian spirit 
sows and reaps in all fields ; is always scattering, applying 
truth, hence always gathering, discovering the new applica- 
tions of truth, including the old in the new, and the new 
in the old, with the endless ingenuity of wise and faith- 
ful husbandry. Nothing is barren with it, and if any truth 
becomes so, it is because the soul has fallen off from its 
free handling and use, has installed it as an inflexible 
precept, instead of accepting its guidance as a flexible 
principle. 

The Scriptures also directly indicate the interior nature 
of the religious life, that all things feed it and none control 
it, that its seed is within itself after its kind. Christ, when 
pressed by the Pharisees as to the coming of the kingdom 
of God, they being thoroughly possessed by an idea of its 
external, formal features, made answer: " The kingdom of 
God cometh not with observation ; neither shall they say, 
Lo here ! or, Lo there ! for behold the kingdom of God is 
within you." This declaration covers the interior growth 
of the soul into the kingdom of God as the condition and 
controlling feature of its coming. In the same spirit the 
apostle says, " For the kingdom of God is not meat and 
drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
Ghost." The opening chapters of the Gospel of John are 
full of this view of the divine truth, working freely, redemp- 
tively in the heart of man. Christ is the word, the light, — 
that strong image of quickening force — and to those who 
receive him he gives power to become the sons of God. 
He that believeth on the son hath everlasting life ; and 



MAN. 159 

he that believeth not the son shall not see life, but the 
wrath of God abideth on him. Belief and life are made 
coextensive, spiritual activity with spiritual well-being. 

The opposite truth receives like explicit statement. 
The first prohibition ran in these words : " But of the tree 
of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it; for 
in the day that thou eatest thou shalt surely die." The 
only interpretation which the facts following seem to allow 
to this command, is that which recognizes the instant fruits 
of sin as accompanying transgression, and enlarging them- 
selves with it. Death at once sets in as the entail of sin, 
that spiritual death of which the decay of physical life 
is the accompaniment, image, harmonious constituent. 
Moses, impressed by this inevitable sequence of guilt and 
punishment, said to the Israelites: "If ye will not do so, 
behold ye have sinned against the Lord : and be sure your 
sin will find you out." God's providence is here glanced at 
as running along with sin, and working retribution through 
it. Judas is spoken of as going to bis own place. The 
wages of sin are earned by it, lie as payment at the end. 
When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin 
when it is finished bringeth forth death. 

The Word of God is not indeed primarily constructed 
on this view of an internal, necessary government by and 
through our moral nature. This is rather the deeper, more 
ultimate truth which we reach as we are able to under- 
stand and receive it ; the light that finds reflection on the 
storm-clouds and gives them their lurid hue. It is not 
the absolute, final statement that is dwelt on in the Scrip- 
tures, — this is too remote, too incomprehensible, and so too 
feeble — but that presentation of it, that expression and 
bearing of it, which are level to the understanding of 
the hearer. We are kept in the outer circle of positive 
authority, till we are ready for the inner circle of pure mor- 



|6o A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ality, which is the true pivot of authority. The Israelites 
are persuaded to obedience by temporal rewards and pun- 
ishments. The future in Christ was not, in its cardinal 
motives, forecast for their instruction. It was impossible 
that it should be. These motives were spiritually more 
remote from them than were the events on which they 
turned in time, and were necessarily reserved till the facts 
in human history could yield, illustrate, enforce them. 
While the gcspels clearly present the divine government 
under its primary aspect of reward and punishment, these 
motives lose their temporal aspect, disclose in the back- 
ground the natural sequence of sin and suffering, holiness 
and pleasure, and are accompanied by the clearest state- 
ments of guilt as a fact exclusively of our moral consti- 
tution. 

The worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not 
quenched, are the physical images of a retribution whose 
interior, immaterial, indestructible elements are plainly 
indicated. The physical image has no consistency with- 
out the spiritual fact it outlines. The grounds of the pun- 
ishment are most explicitly, purely moral. This is the 
condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men 
loved darkness rather than light. The world is reproved 
of sin because they believe not in Christ ! The new light 
gave new conditions and new discoveries ; so the sin of 
the world came forth startlingly on this back-ground of 
divine love, this re-rendering of the moral problem. 

Punishment as punishment subserves a purpose of in- 
struction, awakens and directs the moral nature, but only 
as it keeps close to. and calls forth, a sense of guilt. On 
this condition it works with conscience ; on any other it is 
merely a physical instrument, a bar of violence set up 
against brute force; and so hides rather than discloses 
moral distinctions. If God's government were to intensify 



MAN. l6l 

reward and deepen punishment without calling forth to the 
full therewith moral insight, it would conceal and weaken 
the interior, religious life, overlaying it with alien motives. 
Thus physical and social blessings, unsustained by the 
moral nature, unilluminated by gratitude, and unappropri- 
ated by spiritual aspirations, are the sure inlets of sin, first 
of lethargy, then of perverted desire. The rewards of 
Heaven, to be those of Heaven, must keep pace with and 
quicken spiritual development; they must be wings, un- 
folded wings, with which we fly upward. Nor is it less 
plain that punishments that are imposed primarily from 
without, that are the inflictions of another's will, that are 
alien to the apprehension of the criminal, can never stand 
in concord with his moral constitution, nor educate the soul 
into a knowledge of fundamental principles, nor evoke from 
the guilty spirit its own sentence. Those evils which 
unfold themselves as the normal fruits of sin ; those evils 
which fill the transgressor with his own ways, the folly of 
his own actions, and those positive penalties which antici- 
pate and interpret these, are alone disciplinary. 

God's government in the physical world, and so far as 
we can observe it in the moral world, is one of interior 
forces, of self-executing laws. We believe this to be the 
type of his entire government, and that the moral elements 
at work in the soul of man will more and more show them- 
selves able, without external violence, or corporeal inflic- 
tions, to lay hold of, constrain, punish and reward, in 
short to rule, those who have been placed under them ; to set 
at work in a natural sequence external causes and condi- 
tions which shall concur with and complete the moral 
forces which accompany and control them — control them 
both by an imposed harmony and a direct efficiency. 

The physical world is, as we now observe it, in keep- 
ing with, and dependence upon, the spiritual world ; suf- 



1 62 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

fering and punishment are, in a general way, the direct 
product, under existing conditions, of transgression ; a like 
dependence and relation hereafter would leave each to 
reap as he had sown, he that had sown to the flesh of the 
flesh to reap corruption, and he that had sown to the 
spirit of the spirit to reap life everlasting. Man is, by his 
own nature, by the construction of society, by his relation 
to the world about him, under government, a government 
that turns increasingly on his moral constitution, that is 
deepening, widening, gathering stringency with each year ; 
that already inflicts terrible penalties and bestows great 
rewards, that tightens its grasp according to the transgres- 
sion, and gives liberty and promise only as the soul can 
use them ; a government that springs out of growth and 
ministers to growth ; a government that rests not on 
exterior force but interior life. This government is God's 
ownership in man his creature, an edict that runs constitu- 
tionally, creatively through him, the law not one jot or 
tittle of which can fail till it is fulfilled. Aside from Reve- 
lation man arises in the possession of powers that bring 
totally new responsibilities, and open up a development in 
a spiritual direction whose possibilities cover the remote 
future of this, and, as we believe, of another, stage of being. 
He is the first term of a new kingdom, the kingdom of 
heaven, under its two phases, earthly and heavenly. Nor 
let us be perplexed because God no more hastens results 
in the spiritual than in the physical world. 

We might have opened the discussion of our moral 
nature with an exact statement of what we understand by 
it ; but a partial oversight of its offices helps to prepare us 
for a comprehension of its peculiar features. We would 
put conscience, the moral intuition, at the centre of our 
moral nature. We become moral beings because of the 
power by which we perceive right and wrong in action. 



MAN. 163 

Being so endowed we are made moral, not in one power or 
affection, but in all, since this one cognition gives to 
conduct a controlling plan. All actions are necessarily 
gathered under the one supreme law, and tacitly receive 
their position and relations in character from it. Hence 
our moral nature is pervasive of our entire nature, and 
bears with it everywhere a holier and more spiritual plan, 
by which it compiles in conduct the elements at its 
disposal. 

Conscience discerns right in free, rational action, not 
independently, as the eye perceives color, but in action 
understood in its motives and effects, apprehended in its 
relations backward to the person whose it is, and forward 
to those affected by it. Diligent inquiry, apt reasoning, a 
skillful tracing of results, lively sympathies, are a part of 
the antecedent conditions of correct moral judgments. 
Our entire intellectual and emotional nature finds play in 
making ready that comprehensive presentation of conduct 
which prepares the way for the moral intuition. This 
intuition, when it comes, makes obligatory the action 
which it accepts as right. There is thus, in our moral 
constitution, the utmost opportunity for growth, for a 
thoughtful and broad inquiry into action, since it is only 
upon action as thoroughly understood that conscience is 
prepared to pronounce. Ignorance, according to its 
degree, vitiates the intuition. The moral nature is super- 
induced upon our intellectual nature, and establishes by 
means of it, and over it, a law. The action that was seen 
to be wise becomes obligatory, the conscience assuming 
an authority in regard to it from which there is no escape.^ 
Thus our nature is rendered autocratic. This obligation is 
made up of two elements, primitive and inseparable, the 
double bearings of one thing, the intellectual and emo- 
tional sides of our intuition, its vision forward and reaction 



164 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

backward. The word, right, designates the intellectual 
characteristic of the action, which is the basis of the emo- 
tion expressed by the word, obligation. A feeling must 
have an occasion, must attach itself to some experience, 
perception, intuition. Obligation without any perception 
which can be its ground or occasion, is, if not meaningless, 
practically void. Obligation is significant only as it bears 
on a line of conduct, and the right in conduct is that which 
gives it attachment. So beauty is at once an intuition 
and an emotion ; or an emotional quality which the mind, 
in moments of exaltation, has the power to see and feel in 
fitting combinations. The intuitive qualities, the beauty 
and the right, are especially evanescent as they are primi- 
tive, simple, inexplicable, and easily absorbed, on the one 
hand, in the intellectual apprehensions which give rise to 
them, or, on the other, in the emotions which spring from 
them. They are the subtile links between spiritual affec- 
tions and pure states of the understanding. Language, a 
testimony of the common conviction, has marked their 
presence in this region, and there they are to be sought by 
an insight that has the range of it. 

Obligation, the existence of which all admit, may be 
referred, as we have now referred it, to a simple, primary 
power, or it may be ascribed to that conventional force 
which a community brings to bear on customary action, 
the general sanction which they cast about lines of 
conduct useful or agreeable to them. This view may also 
be strengthened by the accumulated, hereditary force 
which attaches to transmitted tendencies ; by the slow, 
organic growth of a law incipiently weak. We believe 
these explanations and kindred ones unsatisfactory for 
many and strong reasons. We shall not dwell on them, 
but concisely state them. 

That view of our moral nature which grounds it in a 



MAN. 165 

perception of the useful, and looks to public opinion and 
hereditary transfer for its sanctions, does not meet the full 
force of the facts of our moral constitution, either as ex- 
pressed in words or actions. The language of moral con- 
viction is deeper and stronger than this theory suffices to 
explain Its phenomena are broader than it. Guilt is 
more than error, even than shameful and ridiculous error ; 
remorse than chagrin ; virtue than success and compla- 
cency. All clear, strong moral facts harrow and stir the 
mind to a depth quite peculiar. We know what convic- 
tion and what rebuke public sentiment can work. Fash- 
ion, custom find in it their sanctions. To violate fashion 
is to some minds very painful, but even these do not 
mistake the violation for wickedness. Fashion does not, 
in many cases, differ from morals in the force with which it 
coerces, — not a few in the observance of it will set aside 
duty— but in the kind of sentiment it calls forth. This is 
intrinsically different from that which attaches to moral 
obligation. 

In striving to settle the class to which certain facts 
belong, we should consider them, not in their obscurest, 
but in their clearest, form ; we should classify them from 
the centre rather than from the circumference, by their 
bold features rather than by their vanishing outlines. But he 
who has won the grace of virtue, or is struggling with a sense 
of guilt, arraigns himself before the tribunal of his own 
thoughts ; it is peculiarly untrue of him that he commits him- 
self to conventional sentiment. Hence it is a most famil- 
iar fact in the world's moral history that the individual con- 
science opposes itself directly to the community, and stands 
by its own strength against the most concentrate pressure 
of general and hereditary opinion. 

Though the word, right, bears a lower meaning, and 
sometimes simply indicates an action fitted to an end, it 



t66 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 

still yields, in other instances, with no blurred outline, the 
higher moral signification. Though it may have traveled 
up by this pathway of common utilities to its holier import, 
there it stands none the less, a cleansed pilgrim at the 
shrine of Deity. When we say of a courageous act of self- 
sacrifice, that it was right, our verdict is inspired by a 
moral enthusiasm that springs from no calculation of bene- 
ficial results, nor is dependent on the subjection of the act 
to the conventionalities of the community. It is the rec- 
ognition of the light in which a good action is clothed by 
its own moral quality. The minds least subject to the 
merely useful and conventional are preeminently the moral 
minds, yielding bold, strong moral judgments ; while those 
sensitive to public opinion find their moral sentiments 
warped and weakened thereby. The facts, then, of our 
moral nature are neither the same as, nor do they run par- 
allel with, those of custom, usage, usefulness, as now re- 
cognized ; but are constantly crossing them, transcending 
them, confronting them. Both language and daily action 
indicate this want of conformity. There is virtually bound 
up in this objection many items, as the incongruity can be 
traced in many directions, in all directions in which the 
moral phenomena are relatively pure. 

The theories of morals are falling, and must ultimately 
fall more obviously, into two classes, the one with the 
underlying basis of utility, the other of duty ; the one mak- 
ing moral action the product of our circumstances, and the 
other an ultimate law and insight in our constitution. Of 
these theories we accept the second because the moral pro- 
gress of the world has largely, almost exclusively, been 
achieved under it. The hero and the martyr, in their 
response to moral truths, have stood by them as principles, 
not as advantages ; as resting on their own inherent right- 
fulness, not on the opinions of men ; as possessed of an un- 



MAN. 167 

derived glory, not one caught from prevalence. We believe 
this to be so well-known and universal a fact as to call 
for no proof. This spirit was the Christ-like spirit, the 
divine incarnation of the moral temper ; a temper accepted 
by the individual as with him obligatory, self-sufficing, 
final, and by him to be carried to the many ; not as one 
already recognized by them, or caught from them, as gain- 
ful and creditable. Indeed, martyrdom can hardly arise 
on any other terms, or be justified on any other grounds. 
Death, in the declaration of a principle, subserves no uses 
but moral uses, and can receive no gains but moral gains. 
On a basis of physical, temporal advantages it is absurd to 
give all and thereby lose all, to strike from under one's feet 
the very position from which he traffics with the world for its 
goods. When Mill exclaims, in the noble elevation of a 
moral impulse, " I will call no being good, w r ho is not what I 
mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures ; and 
if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, 
to hell I will go," * we do not object to his attitude, but it 
is one singularly transcendental to utilitarian morals. No 
basis can be found for it in mere uses, for hell is the nega- 
tion of all pleasures, and hence all uses. It is a self-affirm- 
ing and self-rewarding morality alone that can stand up 
successfully against a supreme tyranny. Hell, it seems 
then, though it represents the absolute loss of all good, 
save this sense of righteousness we plead for in the mind 
itself, is light when weighed in its inflictions against the 
integrity of the soul. And so, truly,has all suffering been 
held in the presence of virtue by the good and the brave ; 
this is the verdict precisely which has made them brave 
and good. On this idea and this only the world has pro- 
gressed, and must still progress, in a heroic way. All 
other gains are commercial merely. 

* Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy, vol. 1. p. 131. 



105 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

This again is rather a bundle of reasons than a single 
reason, as heroic action strikes to different depths into our 
moral nature and at many points, and at them all discloses 
something of its true tone. 

A third reason for the intuitive view of our moral 
nature is, that it alone affords any true, legal discipline, 
and thus gives a foundation of government. In this point 
is involved the relation of right to liberty. We can have 
no ground for choice, and hence no proper choice, between 
things alike, things that, in their value to us, can be 
reduced to one standard. Between objects that are 
simply useful, the most useful must be taken. The 
ability to take the least useful arbitrarily, with no reason, 
would be a liberty subversive of order, one to be depre- 
cated rather than coveted. It would merely show that the 
mind played at random, and that the influences which 
should control it had lost hold upon it. An inferior good 
can not be chosen in place of a superior one, both being 
defined on a common scale of pleasure, without subverting 
reason. If, therefore, all good can be resolved into utility, 
can be measured in uses by the degrees of pleasure it 
confers, liberty to choose between these degrees can form 
no part of a rational equipment, but must rather interfere 
with it, cutting off the mind from the very considerations 
which should control it. This freedom would be a playing 
loose instead of fast in the mechanism of existence. 

Two kinds of rational government, of orderly, causal 
activity are open to beings so constructed as to come 
under the control of pleasures that admit of registration, 
comparison, degrees as greater or less. These pleasures 
may be found, — as in purely animal organizations — so 
lodged in self-acting appetites, as to settle their claims, 
one with another, by immediate, physical preponderance; 
and to combine themselves in a direct way, like mechanical 



MAN. 169 

forces. If intellectual powers intervene between appetites, 
passions, desires and their gratification, enlarging their 
scope and classifying them, this intellectual action be- 
comes simply a more exact comparison of pleasures, a 
more careful estimate of their separate and relative values ; 
and may be left, under experience, to an increasingly 
automatic discharge of its functions ; the forces so tallied 
and defined being remanded, as before, to their own direct 
efficiency. The intellect is merely additional mechanism, 
putting the appetitive and emotional nature into more 
extended, varied and safer play with its surroundings, 
reducing diverse forms of good, present and remote 
pleasures, to one standard, and passing them into the 
constitution as efficient forces under exact resolution. 
The more complete, precise and unobstructed this inter- 
vening action is, the better, and the mind, if its results are 
to be rapidly and safely made up, must be left to the 
direct and exclusive control of the comparisons whence 
these solutions issue. Here is neither the opportunity 
nor the demand for any liberty. The highest good, when 
seen indexed on the intellectual dial-plate, must be left as 
a motive to do its own immediate work in the emotions 
and actions. The representation is still more exact, if we 
look on the intellect as simply disclosing motives before 
concealed, and thus uniting them with others in direct play 
on an organism of appetites, impulses, w r hose nature it is 
to compound and redirect them in action. The practical 
resolution that is reached, the only one that should be 
reached, is the government of the strongest motive, the free 
expenditure of the predominating influence, with such an 
inclusion of other motives as the case admits. 

Now the right, as an intuitive idea, enters the field of 
desire both to demand choice and to give it conditions. 
It demands choice, because it often directly opposes itself 
8 



I70 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

to pleasures, and always refuses to rank with them. It 
gives to choice its needful conditions, because, refusing in 
ultimate analysis to be recognized as a utility, a good, a 
pleasure of any sort, it can not be brought to a scale of 
degrees with them, and thus lose its power to present an 
alternative. Right remains something forever diverse 
from mere good, and something, therefore, which can be 
rationally chosen a"s opposed to mere good in all its 
degrees. One can wisely say in reference to it, to hell I 
will go rather than surrender it. It is this irresolvability 
of the right into a form of pleasure that enables it to 
furnish the conditions of a rational choice ; nay, to 
demand such a choice. Abundant advantages, indeed, 
flow from its acceptance, but -conscience does not recog- 
nize these advantages as the grounds of its authority. It 
makes gain incident to obedience, not obedience to gain. 
Authority is, with it, primitive and absolute. 

Herein we find the basis of all proper government, the 
very root and ground of the idea among men. Govern- 
ment that does not rest on the moral sense is either vio- 
lence or skill, is bringing to bear overwhelming force, or a 
subtile modification of existing motives, so as to win 
one's ends. In this sense we govern the brute, when by. 
pains or pleasures we bend him to our purpose. The pain 
or the pleasure is looked on merely as an incentive, a 
force, a fresh condition in the problem ; as much so as 
steam added to or withdrawn from the cylinder. It is only 
by an accommodation of words that the engineer can be 
said to govern the engine, or the driver his team. In each 
instance the process is quite another thing from the gov- 
ernment of men. Men alone are governed, and they only 
as the control is based on right, as it avails itself of the 
authority which rules, or is present to rule, in every man's 
bosom. Governments become tyrannies just so far as 



MAN. 171 

they depart from these moral conditions of the problem 
they are dealing with. A mild government may be as 
certainly tyrannical as a harsh one. 

The very presence, then, of government everywhere, 
in a broader, better sense than a control of physical forces, 
or a cunning re-adjustment of motives, discloses the under- 
lying rock of a moral nature on which it rests. If we deny 
the ultimate, primitive character of this sentiment, our 
respect for any form of rule becomes purely conventional ; 
a feeling without foundation beyond its hereditary force; or 
one to be attributed wholly to interested motives, the im- 
mediate operative power of a good or evil just ahead. 
Thus government sinks from its highest to its lowest factor, 
catches its spirit from its meanest not its best subjects, its 
unrighteous not its righteous rulers. It becomes a threat 
and a promise, a new application of motives, an artificial 
contrivance for the guiding or engineering of society 
toward a personal end. The whole moral history of the 
world is swept away. Obedience ceases to be a virtue, 
disobedience a crime. The disciplinary power of the 
restraints of the household, of society, of the state, of man 
over man in those hundred relations in which governments 
so easily and so justly spring up among us, is gone. There 
is no foundation for any of them beyond their usefulness, 
the gains that attend upon them. They are exactions 
profitable to power, or commercial exchanges fair to both 
parties. 

The readiness with which government is established, 
the strength with which it holds its ground, its wholesome 
social, moral discipline, the ethical problems it is con- 
stantly proposing, the blindness of those under it often- 
times to its exact gains, yet their noble enthusiasm in its 
behalf, all serve to contradict the view that can find no 
deeper basis for it than self-interest. Moreover, a utili- 



172 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

tarian theory of morals leaves the utilities reached 
by government in conflict. The utilities of the ruler 
and the utilities of the subject tend to be different, 
at least in the apprehension of the parties, and if 
there is no ground of right between these parties to gov- 
ernment, what but force can settle a conflict of advantages? 
And may not force constantly re-adjust these balances ? 
It may be answered, the utilities of many, of all, and not 
of one or a few, are to be considered ; and, farther, the 
utilities of each viewed from any high point require a respect 
for the utilities of all. This high point, however, is not 
generally accessible, neither is the assertion true on any 
other than a moral foundation, on any other condition than 
a free play of moral sentiments. The highest physical, in- 
tellectual and aesthetical culture of the few is all the more 
quickly reached by the relative degradation of the many, 
by an eager grasping of common resources ; and on grounds 
purely of interest the few can be and are opposed to the 
many. The moral sentiments that prevent this would 
either not arise at all ; or, arising, have no sufficient power 
to alter the condition of society, without a moral law to 
sustain them. 

As to the first assertion, that government must regard 
the utilities of the many, there is nothing save conscience 
either to utter or emphasize this must. A physical power 
that can claim and win its own pleasures, or even the pleas- 
ures of a majority, may in the act hold the pleasures of 
others or of a minority at its mercy. If it be said, that prac- 
tically this is exactly what has taken place, that the world has 
been ruled by vacillating physical forces till it has been 
taught prudence, taught to lay force aside in a serviceable 
compromise of interests, we must deny the statement 
in its broad form, and insist, that there has all along been 
present, in an obscure way, a sense of rights which has 



MAN. 173 

greatly helped to temper and guide the conflict. The 
moral sentiment has by no means ruled in these con- 
flicts, but no more has it let them alone. It has so under- 
lain them as to give them a history, a social, progressive 
character. Nor are we dealing with the ninety-nine cases 
in which rights have wholly or in part miscarried, but with 
the one-hundredth case, worth them all in historic signifi- 
cance, in which they have been sustained. One phenom- 
enon may be sufficient to decide the reality of a new 
element. We must leave the point in its manifold argu- 
mentative bearing to every one's perception. For us the 
moral element is deeply embedded in rights, and righteous 
rule among men. Only thus can these become the strong, 
organic frame-work of order. The insufficiency of mere 
utility, with no underlying moral impulse, to do the work 
assigned it, is clearly seen when we are reminded that 
utility is a mere abstraction, and rests back, in each in- 
stance, on some concrete fact of pleasure for its support. 
The pleasurable act is the useful one. If, then, obligation 
attaches to utility, it does so by first attaching to pleasure. 
But no assertion could be more contrary to our experience 
than this, that our pleasures are obligatory. No sense of 
obligation could be more superfluous than this ; none more 
directly in conflict with the true office of conscience, con- 
stantly ruling our pleasures into the background ; and 
there could be none which would be likely to more em- 
barrass utilitarians themselves in securing a proper enforce- 
ment of the pleasures of others, as opposed to our own 
pleasures. Our own pleasures, as more immediate and 
vivid, would at once have the mastery. 

The government of God, much more imperatively than 
human government, calls for the moral sentiment as its 
starting and returning point. Utility, safety, pleasure to 
be immediately realized, may give some force to human 



174 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ordinances, but the only suitable relation of the soul to its 
Maker is that of affectionate trust and cheerful obedience. 
The rightfulness or righteousness in God's govern- 
ment is far more fundamental than in partial, tran- 
sient, human control, as his government aims so little at 
particular actions, certain things to be done or not to be 
done, and is so wholly spiritual, striving to call forth, shape, 
direct the affections. This its moral character must be 
sustained and fed by a pure moral impulse ; spiritual in its 
aims, it must fully justify itself to the spiritual nature. 
Falling back on interested action, it is unable to contend 
successfully with those sins which are also intrenched in 
selfish feelings. It can not meet and drive back the devil 
with his own weapons. It has no high and holy ground 
from which to wage its battle. . It has forgotten its motto, 
to overcome evil with good. Sin at worst becomes a mis- 
take of selection on the bill of pleasures, and, as the sub- 
jective state of the agent always determines for him what 
is pleasure, the better dishes urged upon him do not dis- 
close to him their superiority. 

Nor can the government of God, unsustained by an 
ultimate moral verdict, urge to advantage sanctions either 
of reward or of punishment. For the Supreme Ruler to 
do this, to add pains aside from the natural tendencies of 
sin, or rewards detached from the rewards of holiness, is 
to throw the problem of conduct more and more off its 
natural basis, and re-adjust it for partial, private ends ; is 
to do the same thing that every earthly tyrant does. 

These farther penalties are admittedly not involved in 
the nature of the wrong act, nor subordinated thereto ; 
are no part of the fruits of sin, but are inflicted on the 
basis of will. But if this will has no intrinsic righteous- 
ness back of it, is not engaged in a pure moral service, by 
what right does it administer punishment ? And how can 



MAN. 175 

the heed given to its penalties fail to obscure the intrinsic 
or moral connection which have been overlooked by 
them? Its inflictions are punishments only in name, and 
in fact are pains used to warp the will of the subject to 
the will of the ruler, are tyranny. 

Purely natural laws, therefore, with merely natural 
sufferings, are all that can remain to God without true 
moral relations to broaden, give direction and rightfulness 
to his government, to put it under an eternal constitution 
of things, and thus in harmony with his work hitherto. 
If we are to deal honestly with utilities, we must let them 
alone, let them show what they are, and not make up our 
account on this side or on that with gratuitous inflictions ; 
we must not tamper with the market before we open trade. 
The useful as the useful merely contains and expresses its 
own force precisely, and is perverted by interference. 
Thus again we should get back to physical nature, and 
this nature would not merely stand as a middle term 
between us and God, but would shut out the divine 
character entirely. We should have to do directly with 
nature, and with nature alone. Utilities are of her sole 
'ordination, and a doctrine of utilities is intrinsically athe- 
istic ; so far atheistic that if a God should be recognized it 
could not rightly allow any interference on his part in 
government. 

Nature, so interposed between us and God, or rather so 
set up in his place, gives us a discipline of prudence but 
not one of obedience, a training by which we become saga- 
cious not wise, one by which the affections are extinguished 
by the thoughts, and a cold cunning takes the place of an 
holy enthusiasm. God's moral government rests prima- 
rily on the affections — out of the heart are the issues of 
life — and goes forth from thence to enlarge, instruct, illu- 
minate the mind. By faith and obedience we climb into 



176 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

peace and wisdom. The government of nature is di- 
vorced from the affections, appeals to the thoughts 
primarily, and thus in the end leaves the heart barren 
and disconsolate. If disaster overtakes us we have no 
resource. " In Hellas, at the epoch of Alexander the 
Great, it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt by 
all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be 
born, and the next best to die. Of all views of the world 
possible to a tender and poetically organized mind in the 
kindred Caesarean age, this was the noblest and the most 
ennobling, that it is a benefit for man to be released from a 
belief in the immortality of the soul, and thereby from the 
evil dread of death and of the gods which malignantly steals 
over men, like terror creeping over children in a dark room ; 
that as the sleep of the night is more refreshing than the 
trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope 
and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods of the poet 
themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal 
blessed rest." * Nature when she deserts us in appearance, 
deserts us in fact. The thoughts lie outside the affections, 
and can not by their correction control those deeper seats 
of life. Our stoicism is inanimate and dead, mere tor- 
pidity. It is light that has warmth in it, that can at once 
reveal and quicken. It is truth which has a moral, per- 
sonal basis, that brings at the same instant intellectual 
and spiritual life to the soul of man. 

A moral government can accept additional sanctions 
which are in harmony with it, as they express the personal 
care of the ruler ; as they lead to pure morality, always 
resting back upon it ; as they may be more immediately 
operative than it on ignorant, indolent, feeble perceptions. 
Pure morality is flexible under the personal element, since 
its products are personal, its laws personal, its prime per- 
* Momm sen's History of Rome, vol. iv. p. 698. 



MAN. 177 

suasion personal. Personal influence is its spiritual atmos- 
phere. Hence the subject easily recognizes the rightful- 
ness of constraint. Tyranny stands in distinction from this 
just government in that it gets back into the region of 
force, deserting that of rights. Pains as pains merely, 
always have this issue, they cast both ruler and ruled out 
of the moral realm. Nor can any utilities save the fall, 
since spiritual claims antedate uses, are not for uses, can 
not be met by uses. There is a moral personality in man 
which submits freely to a moral law, but not to force even 
in behalf of a real good. I may not manage my neighbor's 
property, much as it may need management ; and I may 
no more do it for his interest, than I may for my own. The 
quicker we find this personality, and the more heartily we 
recognize it, the better our government will be. God's gov- 
ernment is supreme in this regard; its whole secret 
is here. 

There is also another bearing of these truths. We 
have spoken of the denial of a primitive moral element. 
This denial not only sweeps away rights and so government, 
it destroys liberty, and thus a second time subverts govern- 
ment, except it be the control of efficient forces. A law 
of nature becomes at once the exclusive type of law, and a 
law of nature implies a force or forces that secure the speci- 
fied results. If there are no such forces, then there is no 
law. Moral law proper, that is, a law struggling to tran- 
scend and to control the facts, can not be, for the facts 
contain and express every law. Realized efficiencies open 
to registration must prevail, and to talk about any other 
law, simply as enjoining any other form of action, is to 
delude ourselves with words. We might as well command 
that gravity should be directly as the distance, and term 
this a law, as to command, Thou shalt not kill, when 
the effective conditions of murder are present, and suppose 



178 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the facts of the case altered by our injunction. If we our- 
selves, as a new composition of forces, can be thrown into 
the general problem, and modify results, very well ; but 
this transformation is not reached by liberty on our part, 
nor by our address to liberty on the part of others. We 
have altered the complexity, but not the character of the 
facts. The law of gravity is not suspended by supporting 
the object ready to fall. Forces working in given ways are 
the only constituents of laws, and what God or men may 
wish or order is another thing quite, is no law in the sense 
that it has anything to do, as a mere wish or command, 
with results. It affects them, and so gains the rank of a 
law, only as it becomes itself a force. The moral features 
of the problem are illusory, the physical or forceful ones 
only are real. The wish operates, not by consent of the 
soul, but as in itself a subtile efficiency, like that which 
pervades automatic action and instinct ; as in some way 
getting hold, like a sense-perception, directly of our con- 
stitution. Moral terms and moral distinctions thus become 
a blind method of putting physical facts, or they are nothing. 
The moral kingdom as a kingdom, and the moral rule as a 
rule, are abolished, since the soul answers not to com- 
mands but to forces, is worked not by elections but by 
efficiencies. 

Once admit necessity and the melancholy descent to 
materialism is logically inevitable. The time we take for 
it will depend on the keenness of our insight. The con- 
nection between human actions and their conditions is 
conceded to be absolute. In this its fundamental feature, 
the intellectual world is identical with the physical. More- 
over, it rests back everywhere on the physical, takes up 
the physical into itself. States of body, activities of brain, 
are incident to every mental state. The question at once 
arises ,; Which of the two series controls the other? 



MAN. 179 

Do mental states induce nervous states, or nervous 
states mental states ? Since absolute fixedness is now 
recognized as belonging to both alike, it becomes neces- 
sary to refer the special to the general, the narrower to the 
broader series of facts, and to make physical conditions 
the controlling element in intellectual states. Only thus 
can we conceive of a medium of efficiency between the 
motive and the action, the impression and the results in 
conduct that flow from it. Many observations come in to 
confirm the view ; we pass by easy stages from facts, 
physical in their bearing, to those purely intellectual, and 
liberty, already set aside, gives us no boundary line. One 
more inference, as natural as those already made, and the 
work is done ; mental events and the concurrent cerebral 
changes are opposite sides, diverse bearings, of the same 
thing. 

Why not? The only material point under discussion 
in a diversity of natures was long ago yielded when mental 
and physical facts were grouped under one law, that 
of causation. 

" It is," says M tiller, "the undeniable teaching of his- 
tory, that the obliterating the distinction between spirit 
and nature always ends in naturalizing spirit and never in 
spiritualizing nature." Why should such a controversy 
end otherwise ? Spirit is always called on to yield its own 
law, its own essential nature to that of matter, and this 
done, the accidents one after another fall in. There 
remains, having identified the laws of the two, nothing 
in behalf of which to wage a warfare. Subtile phenomena 
are too familiar among physical facts to lead us, for this 
reason, to seek for the affections, thoughts, volitions, as a 
series of necessary interlocked states, a special reference. 
The underlying efficiency being a necessary one affiliates at 
once with physical force, and carries with it its phenomena. 



l8o A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

We hold the following to be first principles in our 
moral constitution, to have the relation of postulates to 
moral discipline, (i) Liberty rests on spontaneity, and 
involves the power to do or not to do the actions under 
consideration. In either event the final and sufficient 
reference is not to motives, but to choices. (2) Liberty 
lies in choice, and not in the relation between choice and 
the actions which follow from it. These may suffer phys- 
ical arrest, and the freedom of the soul remain unim- 
paired. Liberty, in its higher sense, is a question of the 
soul's power; in its lower sense, of the body's efficiency. 
Bolts may interfere with the latter, but have nothing to do 
with the former. Herein is the contrast of our Saviour's 
words: "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not 
able to kill the soul." (3) Obligation is proportioned to 
and dependent on power. The power at any moment 
present to discern and perform duty, for that moment, de- 
fines duty. (4) The sense of right is primitive and cen- 
tral in our moral constitution, is at once intuitive and 
emotional, is the ground of duty and so of all government 
that reaches the dignity of an ethical law. (5) Duty is, 
therefore, always changing, is progressive, turning immedi- 
ately on the lines of conduct open to our apprehension, 
level to our ethical judgments. 

The fact that there is scarcely a trace of moral insight 
in the lower tribes of men, does not militate with this view, 
that conscience is a primitive power. A like ignorance of 
numbers is also found. A race that distinguishes numbers 
as far as five shows therein a power to pass this limit, and 
one who attaches any censure to any act holds the rudi- 
ments of a moral nature. The only sufficient disproof in 
any person or tribe of ethical faculties is the inability to 
receive, in this direction, any cultivation. The fantastic 
and the absurd in morals are as reconcilable with the doc- 



MAN. l8l 

trine of a primitive power as with that of an acquired, con- 
ventional respect for the useful. If duty is grounded solely 
in use, then ethical principles, so established, ought espe- 
cially to be serviceable. It is a portion of our view that 
conscience, unaided by knowledge, takes hold in a blind, 
insufficient way ; that it renders correct judgments only 
under correct statements of conduct. Extreme and 
irrational decisions are normal to it in minds character- 
ized by ignorance and intellectual aberrations. The fact 
that the moral nature takes hold, in the beginning, in an 
authoritative though very blind way, of human action, does 
not unfit it for exercising its appropriate role. If it could 
do nothing save on complete and purely rational principles, 
it would find nothing to do. It would be a light shut up 
within walls. 

It is not its office directly to disperse ignorance, but 
to shine through ignorance as it is able. If ignorance 
were absolutely opaque to it, the ignorant would wholly 
lack guidance ; and our guide would not offer himself till 
we could with relative ease dispense with him. Moral 
government is in this allied to all government, to all pro- 
gress, that it is able to gain ground by means of move- 
ments most blind and insufficient. That authority is not 
proportioned to the justice or wisdom of the precept, is a 
fact in the discipline of men that makes strongly for the 
primitive character of conscience, and one also which fits it 
to deal with the blind, the willful, the vicious. Pure reason 
is too pure, too supersensual, for the base. A power that 
moves toward reason, that enforces whatever measure of 
it we may now have, that sets up lines of authority even 
though they be mistaken ones, is what is wanted, and this 
is conscience. When reason is fully enthroned, conscience 
as latent authority is included in it ; the two become 
practically identical. A new dissolution may disclose the 



152 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

silent element, like latent heat, but it is evoked only by 
analytic force. Herein is the weakness of the wisest 
utility, that the very coldness of its rationality restricts it 
in doing its most urgent work, that of ruling the irrational. 
The most partial and perverted government enfolding a 
principle of government is far better than no government, 
and this nucleus of life we find in our moral constitution. 
It can lay hold of the most untoward conditions, and com- 
mence control. It can shape and reshape its precepts, 
put them in closer connection with principles, and enforce 
them at every stage. It furnishes a state that by revolu- 
tion can pass up to freedom. Utility does not meet the 
conditions of this growth, because it fails of authority, 
especially in its earlier, feebler forms • and the conven- 
tional sentiment by which it is proposed to sustain it can 
have little or no hold on a constitution not predisposed by 
its own powers to obedience. Brutes may herd by 
instinct, by direct emotional adaptations ; men may 
institute laws under incipient constitutional forces, but 
conventional sentiment that finds no nourishment in pri- 
mary powers or feelings expresses little or nothing, certainly 
not that majestic impulse which is the unfolding life of an 
individual, a nation, a race, which contains in it the germs 
of all civil rule and spiritual edification. 



IMMORTALITY. 1 83 

CHAPTER VII. 

Immortality. 

TjnHE first belief on which religion rests is that in 
JL the being of God, complete in power, wisdom, good- 
ness. A second belief scarcely less requisite to it is 
that in immortality. If the first is needful as a starting- 
point to religious faith and action, to the higher play of 
our personal life, the second is needful to impart to this 
activity its appropriate breadth and power. If our pres- 
ent existence bounds the life of man, its field is far too 
narrow, its motives far too immediate and restricted, its 
incentives far too feeble, to put the soul in living, sustained 
contact with God, or in hopeful fellowship with his work. 
Under such conditions wisdom almost necessarily sinks 
down to prudence, faith to foresight, obedience to sagacity, 
and hope to the impressions of the passing hour. Indeed, 
the dreams of immortality will not easily fade out of the 
human soul. Though the doctrine may be denied, there 
will linger a noble,despairing struggle for earthly renown, 
a place in memory with the illustrious dead. We brighten 
our horizon by these slight traces of the setting sun. 

The conviction of the certainty of a future life will wax 
and wane with that of the being of God. The same causes 
that affect the one will act on the other. The scientific 
habit of thought, as opposed to the philosophical, the 
spiritual, has weakened the hold of both truths in many 
minds. A portion at least of those who cling to immor- 
tality do it in a despairing way, by a stiffened tendril of 
faith, by an instinctive impulse, rather than by a clear 
conviction, a touching of the rock of truth, and establish- 
ing thereon tenacious points of growth, a foothold for 



184 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

living forces. " There are three points of religious belief, 
regarding which intuition (or instinct) and logic are at 
variance — the efficacy of prayer, man's free-will, and a 
future existence. If believed, they must be believed, the 
last without the countenance, the two former in spite of the 
hostility of logic." This passage from Mr. Greg deservedly 
draws from Mr. Martineau the censure of being " absolute 
Pyrrhonism, subversive alike of knowledge and faith."* 
This unbelief is a wrong done our higher nature, one sub- 
versive of its first principles. Till we can rest with quiet 
conviction on the laws of our own spiritual constitution, 
we can rest in no promises addressed to it. If we are im- 
mortal, that immortality must take deep hold of our spir- 
itual nature, and through it furnish us sufficient proofs, if 
we are able to see them. The facts of our constitution, 
of the divine government and the divine love, are too inti- 
mately associated with a future life to leave that life a 
matter of conjecture, of weary hope, to those who search 
for its evidences at the right point, with a comprehending 
spirit. 

It can not be that the divine hand so fails in cunning 
as to allow the human soul, ready to be sped by this strong 
impulse — almost the strongest as it defines the force of 
every other — to suddenly fall, like an arrow that at the 
instant of discharge has lost the string. The history of 
individuals, races, nations will not allow the conclusion ; 
this belief has from the beginning been in one way or an- 
other at work in the world. If the fact does not prove the 
doctrine, it proves that there lies somewhere proof very 
pertinent to its discussion. 

Nor can we leave the assertion of immortality to Reve- 
lation alone. The Scriptures assume it as they assume 
the being of God. If these two doctrines were to rest on 
* Studies of Christianity, p. 279. 



IMMORTALITY. 1 85 

the Scriptures for support instead of supporting them, the 
difficulties of proof would be indefinitely increased. With- 
out an antecedent faith in a future life, Revelation labors 
under a heavy burden. It finds the mind distrustful in- 
attentive, indisposed ; wrapped up in impressions and 
methods of proof too narrow to receive its evidence, or to 
justly weigh it when advanced. The foundations of a faith 
in a future life, lie outside of Revelation, and ought, there- 
fore, to be disclosed independently of it. Revelation may 
indeed greatly strengthen our convictions ; it may make 
plainer the grounds of our belief, bring our immortality to 
light, but it is immortality which gives promise of Reve- 
lation, not Revelation which lays in our own constitu- 
tion and in the government of God the foundations of 
immortality. 

The case is not as strong, it is true, in reference to a 
future life as in reference to the being of God ; yet the one 
truth, like the other, lies in the way to Revelation. First, 
the spiritual government of God and then the scope of it 
prepare us for his intervention and guidance. The inspi- 
ration of prophet and apostle rests antecedently on theism, 
and so on the faith in a future life, incident thereto. 
Christ, when urged at this point by the Sadducees, simply 
fell back on a more penetrative interpretation of the Old 
Testament, its implications, its assumptions. God is 
not the God of the dead but of the living. The field of 
Providence is absurdly narrowed by this limitation of our 
life. Infinite attributes become futile, dealing only with 
finite, transient products. The force of the inference is 
due in some sense to its remoteness. The Fatherhood of 
God finds no sufficient application under the narrow con- 
ditions of this life. Union of man with God carries the 
doctrine of immortality. The mind passes first from man 
to God, —the spiritual nature of the inferior, the sign and 



l86 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

symbol of that of the superior — and from man and God in 
fellowship to immortality. 

On grounds so deeply hidden in our nature is it that 
the doctrine of immortality is generally prevalent among 
men, is closely interlocked with every religion, is assumed 
by Revelation, and becomes one whose distinctness is pro- 
portioned to the firmness of the soul's belief, first in itself, 
second in God. Mr. Greg unites a failing confidence in 
free-will to a faltering belief in a future life. There is 
here more than the affinity of kindred feelings. 

The Scriptures, by virtue of their purpose, hold some- 
what in abeyance the doctrine of immortality : they do 
not allow future and less urgent relations to overshadow 
present and more urgent ones ; they do not bring vividly 
forward conditions alien in kind or intensity to those now 
about us, and with a frenzy of hope or fear break up 
the peaceful, healthful flow of our being. The Old Testa- 
ment especially keeps every eye within the range of its own 
horizon. The New Testament, enlarging and spiritualizing 
as it does the duties and scope of life, bringing its disciples 
face to face with great dangers and long, discouraging 
conflicts, more frequently reminds them of the inclusive 
character of the kingdom for which they struggle, and of 
a future which holds so many of its rewards. As the 
service becomes exacting the soul is sustained by a cor- 
responding breadth of view. Yet is it not in all cases the 
secret of a sober life to see the future only through a diaph- 
anous present, to labor toward it by the light it sheds on the 
work in hand ? An alien future — and a future of eager and 
indolent hopes must ever be alien — drawing us to itself, 
makes us aliens to the present, to its duties and develop- 
ments, and so estranges our hearts from the very discipline 
we are undergoing, its joys and its triumphs ; causes us to 
grow dizzy and slip on the very ladder we are climbing. 



IMMORTALITY. 1 87 

It can hardly be gain for us to die, till it is Christ for us 
to live. The human soul is too easily flurried and frenzied 
to abide close under either the hopes or the fears of a 
future life, and yet maintain the equanimity, the relish of 
pleasure, requisite to its own growth. That the back- 
ground of immortality is not more vividly colored seems 
due to the fact, that the inspired artists are dealing with 
the foreground of duty, are not dreaming but working, 
not predicting but shaping the future. The fields we tread 
yield more beauties and more fruits under a veiled light 
than under a scorching, midday sun. 

The weak hold which some earnest natures now have 
of the doctrine of immortality we believe to be incident to 
that scientific form of thought which finds extreme expres- 
sion in evolution, as an inclusive factor of belief. There 
are in the universe, according to this theory in its ultimate 
statement, no increments, no new forces, hence no funda- 
mental differences. What is offered in one part strikes deeply 
into all parts. Nothing is isolated in any one relation. We 
can not isolate man. The whole animal and vegetable 
kingdoms lie back of him, and along side of him, not in 
one part but in all parts of his nature ; and what we hope 
for him we should hope for each allied series. Immortality 
can not be conceded as a gratuity here and withheld there, 
when that and this have sprung up from one source under 
one law. Life is one in kind everywhere, everywhere 
incident to a physical organism ■ and to look for it 
when its constant, universal condition is wanting, would 
be to look for an arm without a body to nourish it. Life, 
though it combines high intelligence, bears no more 
impress of immortality than any other incident of being. 
It is one wave in the eternal flow of forces, and sinks as 
easily back into the universal .flood as another. We have no 
reason to affirm immortality of any life, or if we affirm it 



155 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

of any to withhold it from any. The spiritual nature of 
life, as an independent essence or principle, if it lingers at 
all in scientific thought, grows weaker and weaker, and the 
proof for the immortality of the human soul, as an "indis- 
cerptible"' something which decay and death cannot reach, 
vanishes. It may well vanish. We know far too little of 
the nature of life or of the essence of spirit, if indeed we are 
not quite misled by the images the words suggest — to 
rest any assertion on alleged ultimate qualities of souls. 
The images of immortality, chrysalis and butterfly, go 
for nothing with science, for they are illustrations, not 
arguments. Nor does any enlargement of intelligence in 
man aid our proof. Intelligence, all of it, is the slow growth 
of external and internal conditions, is all of it the product 
of physical facts, and finds its full office in dealing with 
those facts. To say that such a nature is too exalted 
for its circumstances is to forget its relations to those cir- 
cumstances ; to say that it ought to have a broader field 
for more permanent unfolding is to invoke aid from a 
foreign source, an intuitive moral nature. Intelligence, 
looked upon purely as intelligence, as a fact in the physical 
world, a manifestation incident to complex organism, gives 
us an argument adverse to immortality. As we pass 
upward the spiritual is more and more closely united 
to the physical, more and more constrained by it, un- 
folded under it, and so limited to it. Every specialization 
is a limitation, a closer union. Proof every year increases 
that each intellectual effort has an equivalent expression in 
nervous action, and most are prepared to give this principle 
the extension of a complete statement. As the flame about 
the burning wood, so the soul of man plays about the 
molecular changes of brain-tissue, and there is little incli- 
nation in science, and less ability, to separate the two. 
When the torch of life flickers and goes out in its socket, 



IMMORTALITY. 



the scientist hardly feels prompted to inquire what has 
become of its light. High intelligence, therefore, as the 
product of complex and special combinations, least of all 
forms of force admits of composite transfer, most of all in 
transfer loses its peculiar character. 

Under evolution the moral nature yields no new ele- 
ment, it is but one manifestation of our intellectual nature. 
It is a generalized experience, an inherited tendency, a 
modified instinct, or all these combined, and furnishes no 
fresh ground for our argument. It rests downward and 
spreads outward, like its co-ordinate forces, and is as re- 
stricted in its uses as are they. One plant may grow 
higher than another, but none touch the heavens ; there is 
nothing in any of them transcendental. 

That which is to return to heaven must come down 
from heaven, that which is to show itself spiritual must be 
a spirit, that which arises under transient conditions 
must disappear with those conditions, must submit itself 
fully to them. There is not and can not be the slightest 
promise to man of immortality under a doctrine of evolu- 
tion, strictly held and clearly realized. All things are in 
substance and in law shifting, fluent, submissive, the higher 
the more so, and we might as well predicate immor- 
tality of a sunset, as something too brilliant to fade away; 
or of the unsubstantial form of a summer's cloud, as some- 
thing too subtile to be dissolved and lost, as of the human 
soul. 

We comeback then to philosophy, more particularly to 
our moral nature, and to that view of it which makes it 
something more than a product of uses, as yielding the 
only sufficient proof of immortality. The scientist will 
show the clearness of his thought in at once denying this 
doctrine, and the philosopher in resting it exclusively on a 
moral basis. This nature gives a difference, a broad 



I90 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

division, between the life of man and the lives below him. 
He is no longer burdened with the immortality of shell-fish, 
squid and polyp, or even of dog and horse, as reposing on 
proof the same as that which establishes his own immor- 
tality. He cuts himself loose from the motley, and from 
this point of view, ignoble, throng below him, and plants 
his hope wholly on that which is peculiar to him, his moral 
nature with its supplementary rational powers. 

This nature lays down a boundary line, and puts its pos- 
sessor, in reference to the world about him, on the farther 
side. Ethical insight, with freedom, its accompanying 
power, enables man to take possession of the world for 
his own ends. He is not a product of it,born in due time 
out of it, but is over it, able to modify and use it with a 
final end and independent force. We can no more argue 
from the scope and laws of the physical world to man than 
we can from the dwelling to its occupant. The fortunes 
of the one do not include or control those of the other. 
Man in his powers comes from above nature, is beyond the 
range of its necessary laws, and may well enough, there- 
fore, have quite another destiny ; nay, such a destiny is 
indicated by a position so exalted and so anomalous. 

He is not one in a series, slowly evolving itself upward ; 
one of a race,slowly emigrating into new fields of life along 
many lines of progress, but he crowns all series, confronts 
all races, holds in final poise and sufficient service the 
physical creation thus far. To those then who recognize 
a spiritual realm, and make, as they must make, that realm 
ultimate, man touches it, unites the physical world to it, 
and permanently lifts the whole up into relationship with 
this seat of life. That man's life is also phenomenal, ephe- 
meral, becomes a supposition that, by a stolen march, 
seizes the defile by which we enter the spiritual kingdom, 
and holds it for the earth-force, the blind demiurge, be- 



IMMORTALITY. I91 

neath us. Spirituality has no significance without immor- 
tality. The kingdom of God is not other or more than the 
kingdom of the world, if it is permeable everywhere, muta- 
ble everywhere, under the same shifting, physical forces. 
The new term, pure spontaneity, free spirit, given in man, 
is the first term of a new kingdom. 

To this branch of our nature we must turn for proof of 
immortality, proof quite sufficient if we believe in an intui- 
tive moral law, established in our own constitution, en- 
throned in the nature of God, and so over the spiritual 
universe. The moral law is too broad, far too broad, for 
the present life merely. It does not fit into it. It devotes 
it to ends absurdly ill-timed, the vaporings of enthusiasm, 
if there is no opportunity to win them, to complete them, 
beyond the present hour. Why should one pursue a moral 
ideal if that ideal is to lead him in a vain effort to the bor- 
ders of life, and then forever escape him ? Virtue, high 
virtue, aspiring, wrestling virtue, is a chimera, a spiritual 
delusion, a fine but foolish frenzy, if virtue is not deep- 
seated in the powers of the soul, and that, too, of a soul 
bracing itself for a great and a growing victory ■ if virtue 
is only the necessary, almost mechanical, adjustment of 
mind and body to transient conditions for the quiet of the 
passing hours. We might as well try to mistake the sto- 
lidity with which we settle down to the hardships of an 
uncomfortable voyage for heroism, inspiration, as to mis- 
take the bending of the mind to the utilities of its present 
state of being for a mastery over them, a sufficient nour- 
ishment of the soul. Utility is the appropriate morality 
of a purely earthly existence, of a life in simple ministra- 
tion to wants ; since it is rounded into the range of forces 
actually bearing on man ; since it fits the mind with the least 
worry, the lightest disappointment, the simplest labor, to 
run quietly in its own narrow circle of being. No disturb- 



192 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ing attractions from beyond the system, are allowed to 
enter. Merely intellectual life is as rightly turned down- 
ward to utilities as upward to duties. 

These utilities, in our hasty years, are to be carefully 
watched and eagerly gathered, for they are quickly lost. 
A keen, sharp eye may well be set to this service. To 
these ends the brute bends his faculties and we may bend 
ours, if we have no higher purposes than fall to him. Such 
purposes we have, and through them alone the intellect 
wins a higher ministration. 

The moral nature transcends the limits of our present 
life, and brings, in many particulars, a broader rule, a 
secret, spiritual adaptation. In the range of its motives it 
quite oversteps the gains of the present. These motives 
turn primarily on character, and the only ground on which 
this high estimate of character as opposed to pleasure can 
be maintained is the worth of the one in reference to the 
other. But this worth rests on durability, immortality, 
mastery. In the competition of a single hour, a spiritual 
pleasure, as a present, concrete state, has no necessary 
and universal precedence over an intellectual or a physi- 
cal enjoyment. The three are rated by the part they take 
in the sum total of being ; and no supreme importance, no 
such importance as the moral nature assigns it,can be given 
to character, the strictly spiritual element, unless this has 
a deeper relation to our welfare than it discloses in the 
scanty years of our present existence. Indeed, character 
can not be kept up to its proper estimate on a thorough 
utilitarian basis. It sinks into something quite other than 
itself. Nothing could be more saddening, exasperating, 
disappointing than the labors, conflicts, aspirations of 
virtue undergone on this narrow field of strife. The birth- 
throes of our moral being issue in nothing ; we are never 
through with them. All that is locked up in such words 



IMMORTALITY. I93 

as the sense of obligation, nobility of character, greatness of 
soul, personal liberty, moral worth, on which ethical speech 
is ever ringing its manifold and stirring appeals, is little in- 
deed, if the soul's strength is after all no store-house for 
virtue, but we let slip in due time our spiritual possessions 
by the same law by which we shed our teeth. No rational 
being can, or will lay, or ought to lay, the same stress, or 
anything like the same stress, on character, if it is as evanes- 
cent as are the competing pleasures of appetite, as he must 
and will ascribe to it if it be, in its spiritual elements, im- 
mortal. The moral nature habitually attaches to character 
the importance which would fall to it on the supposition of 
immortality. It thus presupposes a future life, and is irra- 
tional without it. In opposing character to happiness it 
does it by virtue of the superior power, the time-element, in 
it. The gains of creation, law ov^r chaos, are due to time. 
This range of motives is also seen in the steady main- 
tenance by conscience of future good as opposed to 
present good, and the good of others as opposed to our 
own good. If this life is all, and the sum of our pleasures 
in it our entire gain, then prudence would caution us as to 
the conditions on which we let any enjoyment slip. The 
largest aggregate of enjoyment is the question which in- 
terests us, and remote, secondary and uncertain returns 
must, in the comparison with present, direct and certain 
pleasures, suffer severely. We shall not be disposed to 
speculate, and incur risks, any more in moral than in 
money gains. There is, moreover no reproach of con- 
science to trouble one in grasping his indulgences, if he 
decides that this life is his entire life, and that its law is 
the law of highest pleasure, as it should be. This supposi- 
tion eliminates at once and forever any thing peculiar and 
preeminent in the moral sentiment. The soul grasps its 
gratifications as unhesitatingly as the merchant his profit. 
9 



194 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

If conscience issues an edict of its own, holding us aloof 
from coveted enjoyments, with no clear promise of coming 
equivalents and on conditions other than those of a fair 
trade, it thereby shows itself not to be a law of prudence 
evolved from the experience of passing years, but a primary 
power. The moral sense not only attaches more value to 
character than it ought, it gives far less value to pleasure 
than falls to it under any other supposition than this most 
pregnant one, that our present existence is disciplinary in 
reference to a future state. Its estimates are all made up 
on this tacit assumption, and can neither be justified or 
enforced without it. Nor can these tendencies of the 
moral nature be referred to a half-conventional, half-in- 
stinctive sentiment, transmitted and strengthened by 
inheritance. They have none of the characteristics of an 
instinct. They decline with intelligence, and increase with 
intelligence. The law of instinct is the reverse of this. 
Rational impulses stimulate the conscience, they repress 
instincts ; conscience is no instinct. 

A second direction in which the moral sentiment 
transcends a law of uses, and so the conditions of our pres- 
ent life, is found in the type of conduct it permanently 
commands. No censure is too severe with it for the deser- 
tion of truth, no matter what the inducements to such a 
betrayal ; no praise is too great with it for a bold, faithful 
adherence to truth, how little so ever is gained by it. This 
is a hair-brained judgment, if truth after all only ministers 
to pleasure, and takes rank with the other means of en- 
joyment. A martyr is a fanatic of the most extreme, 
refractory kind, since he not only forfeits all pleasure for 
one pleasure ; he loses this also by the very means he takes 
to secure it. The relaxed hand of death holds nothing, 
not even the reward of integrity. He should reason con- 
cerning virtue as Falstaff concerning honor. Immortality, 



IMMORTALITY. 195 

must be or there can be no wise surrender of life for the truth. 
If it be said that the martyr at least escapes the shame and 
reproach of betrayal, yes, but why should there be such 
shame and reproach? Why do we not feel in the moral 
conflict as does the Indian brave in his warfare, that it is 
folly, not courage, to sacrifice life when nothing can be 
won by the sacrifice ? 

The attitude of the soul which leads it to exclaim in 
the presence of death, " Here I stand, I can do no other- 
wise, God help me," is sheer frenzy. If there is no good 
save the good which comes to living men, and this faith- 
fulness of the soul is betraying it to its final overthrow. 
we have a fallacy like that of the miser, who can not use 
the very wealth he values, who destroys its worth by an 
overestimate. 

There may seem to be grandeur in self-sacrifice, in 
unquestioning obedience to a higher law, but it is folly 
none the less, if law and life perish together in these ethical 
explosions. It is allowing a gusty wind of sentiment to 
flare our torch into this flash of light and so extinguish it. 
The law of morals can be one of self-sacrifice through each of 
its degrees only as it is disciplinary, putting us firmly back on 
the benevolent, the divine impulse, and so giving us a true 
start for immortality. This is a tantalizing law if it offers us 
a race, trains us, allows us no repose, and then remorselessly 
and forgetfully crowds us back into oblivion. Our moral 
nature is a restless impulse of endless waste and worry, 
making us of all men most miserable, if this life stands 
by itself alone. As ephemera we should be allowed the 
joys of ephemera, and be left to dance out the brief day 
in our own sunbeam. This is not saying that the moral 
law is a burden, the moral life a drudgery, but that it can 
not be sustained without its own proper conditions, its own 
inspirations, hopes. How can a man be put to choose 



I96 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

between death and the moral law ? If he chooses the law 
he sinks with it in darkness ; if he rejects the law he con- 
jures up a ghost of retribution to embitter the existence he 
has saved. Ruin lies equally in either path, whether he 
lose consciousness or lose honor; so extreme is the 
exigency into which this highest nature of his drives him. 

The moral law has a sweep, and must be operated with 
a sweep, beyond that of this life, or it can not clear itself, 
can not revolve freely, and bring forward in due order and 
circuit those supreme motives with which the soul is held 
to duty, its hopes maintained, its life fed. The rational 
spirit must feel the in-rushing winds of eternity, an 
atmosphere wafted to it from beyond the grave, or its 
aspirations are smothered, and slowly expire, oppressed by 
the heavy, sluggish air of a too narrow enclosure. Here 
lie the weightiest proofs of immortality, those of coherence, 
completeness, adequacy. Without immortality to support 
it, we set up in the moral nature a transcendental law, 
suicidal in its highest, and fanciful in all its applications, 
evoking desires it can not satisfy, imposing duties it can not 
reward, and enkindling a life that it smothers down again 
at its maximum. A wheel arrested at the outset with 
sudden crash and collision, would be the type of the moral 
force, and of the part it plays in the world. Crime, shame, 
remorse, punishments are its first ruin, its disjecta membra. 
The law of animal life does its work well, the law of human 
life is fitful and extravagant, enhances actual evils and adds 
imaginary ones. Its motion, like that of a balance wheel, 
partially magnetic, in a watch, is wayward and fluctuating, 
so controlled by remote affinities that it can no longer divide 
and sub-divide our days into safe and equal sections of 
pleasure. 

Our argument at this point is, that the moral law act- 
ually transcends time, and so holds in its constitution, by 



IMMORTALITY. 1 97 

clear implication, immortality. It does this by the motives 
it enforces, by the standard of conduct it sets up. The 
same range of application is also implied in the defective 
results with which it now satisfies itself, and in the incip- 
ient character of the products in which, under the most 
favorable conditions, it issues. The wicked are unequally, 
often slightly, punished, the righteous are partially rewarded; 
all awards are incomplete. There are more iteration and 
threat in the law than are met by the on-coming penalties. 
Positive law, human law must be constantly called in to 
supplement moral law, and set it in action. We are struck 
with inequality, insufficiency and discordance. The world 
is needlessly harrowed by conscience, if these immediate 
results are the sum-total of issues. Everywhere there are 
deficiency and excess ; one is callous, another unduly con- 
scientious. We have stages of growth rather than processes 
of administration. The precision of the animal kingdom 
is lost in the spiritual one. The intellect of man brings 
with it inferior rather than superior government, indirect 
and insufficient ideas in place of direct and sufficient sen- 
sations. This moral sway, this rule of righteousness, calls 
for time to clear itself; the very time that was included 
in its purview when it was set up. 

So also the product in which moral discipline issues 
implies its scope. There is but one fitness, one consola- 
tion, in the death of a good man, that he shall live again. 
The extinction of such an one is a loss to himself, to the 
present sum of good, to the promise of good in the future ; 
it would take place in utter disregard of the conflict between 
good and evil, which is the one crowning feature of the 
spiritual universe. This strife is most painfully belittled, 
dwarfed, if its most faithful combatants perish in the mo- 
ment of victory. The character of a good man is a ser- 
viceable power, a deserving power, a germinant power. 



190 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Its resources of growth have not approached exhaustion, 
it is simply making ready for normal growth. Like the 
plant still fed by the nourishment of the seed, it has hardly 
entered on its own career. There is in it yet no complete 
cycle of being, it is preparing for a career. Experience, 
trial are incipient, preliminary, and, without an opportunity 
for the use of the powers so unfolded, they become in a 
large measure abortive. Our spiritual nature is peculiarly 
ill-devised, if it is thus to wither in the green leaf; if we 
are to discern good, freely engage in its pursuit, and miss 
it just as the conditions of success are present. This life 
is to the spirit embryo life, and if embryo life, then death 
must yield the conditions of birth. It is not true, as the 
poet laments, that we find the keys of life only to open the 
gates of death. There is no deeper accusation against 
the creative plan or its development. 

The earthly immortality that falls to great moral 
natures, to Socrates, Paul, Marcus Aurelius, John Cal- 
vin, shows the hidden vigor of this form of being. Shall 
the shadow thus abide and not the thing itself? 

Man's moral nature gives a power capable of immortal-, 
ity, furnishes a reason for immortality, and so sets up a 
claim for immortality. A nature in us and in society, so 
rudimentary, so germinant in the years that fall to it, so far 
off from symmetrical growth, can allow arrest no more 
than creation or evolution. Each step may be better than 
the preceding, and in reference to it must therefore be ; a 
must holding in itself the cogency of eternal fitness ; a 
must that includes the growth of the individual with that of 
society, since both rest on the same principle, inherent 
potentialities. No point is reached within observation by 
the growing mind and heart, in which life is not intrin- 
sically more valuable, more beautiful, and hence none in 
which it is not more imperative ; for the good and the 



IMMORTALITY. 199 

beautiful are the imperatives of the moral world. Powers 
carry with them rights ; this is an axiom of human society. 
Undeveloped powers set up claims, include rights, in all 
the kindred jurisprudence of the spiritual world. 

A distinct argument for immortality is the earnest hope 
for it which clings to the human soul. What man, unless 
he has made a ruin of life, contemplates annihilation with 
pleasure? Who, loving life, rejoicing in it with the pure 
enthusiasm of power, can approach close to this idea of 
extinction without a shudder, without a sudden loss of 
hope, a sense that the congealing hand of death has already 
touched him ? The aversion of the soul to annihilation 
is deep-seated and instinctive, like that felt to death itself 
chiefly because it sits as warden under the deep shadow 
of mysterious walls, at the entrance of unexplored regions. 
" More light " is the despairing cry with which the unassured 
soul enters on these explorations. Men hope, it may be 
said, for many things, and those hopes are no prediction. 
Yet this argument which we rest on the hopes of men is 
none the less a very strong one. Its force is due to our 
confidence in the moral nature of God. A hope which is 
an inspiration, which is to the soul as morning light, a 
hope, yearning, stronger, clearer as the spirit gains power, 
is a promise of God, a rational anticipation of his purpose, 
the fore-running indication of his love. It is better than 
specific words, since it lays hold so deeply, so freely of his 
integrity, the moral soundness and gracious favor of God. 
God knows the human heart, knows its best impulses, and 
will not allow them to be misdirected and baffled com- 
pletely, forever. The very being of such a hope is an 
argument ; it is light and comes from a source of light; it 
is a soul making answer to its affiliations, the echo of time 
to eternity. To deny this is to impeach the soundness, 
the goodness of God. 



200 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Indeed this is the precise basis of the argument, faith, 
confidence in God. We need, in order to apprehend it, 
ethical insight, and the strong sense of obligation which 
accompanies it. A morality of utilities, whatever play it 
may find with men, is inapplicable to God. Obligation 
can not come to him as a conventional, hereditary or in- 
stinctive sentiment, it must be the final flat of reason. 
Confidence in God as a perfect moral being is faith, and 
this faith it is which lays hold of a worthy, stimulating 
hope as a virtual promise. It is not one, indeed, freed 
from conditions, but one which under conditions we must 
hold to as certainly as to the ethical character and force of 
the divine government. God can tacitly promise, and does 
promise, to meet the aspirations he kindles, to pour light 
into the eyes he creates. Every thought of immortality, 
every recognition of it as a theory that can be, becomes 
a divine assurance that it is a theory that shall be. If we 
yearn for it, with the constitutional force of a spiritual 
nature, this is proof that he has provided us for it and 
so it for us ; the thought, the hope, the labor are the very 
activities by which we take hold of God's grace in this 
direction. Such faith is a perfectly rational element ; it is 
that by which we gain daily strength from the integrity of 
men. It is rightly said, it shall be unto us according to 
our faith, since faith is the casting of our spirits, themselves 
loyal to truth, on the spirit of God, loyal to the same truth ; 
it is the fellowship of virtue, than which nothing is a safer 
reliance, a more rational dependence. 

Hence when Revelation comes, assuming our nature, it 
also assumes its legitimate field of development, and 
simply bears us forward toward the goal. All who have 
laid hold of God, who have drawn near, have felt this 
promise of his, this lasting fellowship, this stealing of his 
life downward and our lives upward. What, indeed, is a 



IMMORTALITY. 201 

spiritual union to him but this ? This portion of the argu- 
ment can not be resolved into known terms of definite 
value for every man. Is it, therefore, of less worth ? The 
reliance that comes from it is like that which binds friend 
to friend, and can not be taken beyond the bounds of 
faith. Confidence in immortality has thus always had a 
large personal element in it, has been strengthened up to 
the point of efficiency by belief in God, and direct fellow- 
ship with him. 

Another argument, resting in the same direct way on 
the integrity of God, is the fact that this doctrine of im- 
mortality vindicates itself by its practical results, by con- 
ferring great and increasing benefits on man. It plays 
into our powers in a wholesome, stimulating, living way. 
It enlarges their scope, makes them cognizant of the bear- 
ings of action, and evokes noble and sustained effort. 
This truth thus shows itself an efficient and valid constit- 
uent of our present moral discipline. If God allows a 
motive of this kind to do this exalted work, if it can do 
this work, it is because we have in it a true, a real force. 
Illusion can not take the place of facts, and the moral 
system maintain its soundness, God his truthfulness. 

Every argument adduced, every argument we are able 
to adduce, finds its support in the ethical nature. It is 
this which is out of harmony with the restricted life we here 
lead, this that craves and demands more, that is sending 
into the future vanishing lines of activity. Without this 
nature, the freedom it involves, the responsibility it devel- 
ops, the character it contemplates, the possibilities it in- 
locks, the faith it calls forth, there would be no sufficient 
ground to believe in immortality. In disturbing, then, the 
foundations of our moral constitution, we disturb those of 
a future life. As a fact, those who hold feebly this belief 
are resolving the duties of morality into prudential precepts. 



202 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

They are shut off from the heavens because they have 
clipped the wings by which alone they can mount thither. 

So deep-seated is our plea for immortality. It is con- 
stitutionally ours, ours as interwoven with the law of our 
spiritual life, ours as in fellowship with God, ours as being 
to us an intimation, a promise, resting on his faithfulness 
and love. Here we stand by faith in ourselves, by faith in 
God ; and whatever may be the fluctuations of feeling, we 
go down to death with the declaration and claim and hope 
of immortality on our lips. We cast in our lot with that 
great multitude who have felt and followed the instinctive, 
insatiable impulse. If the scientist must disbelieve, and 
we see not how he can believe, we profoundly pity the 
darkness in which he is enclosed. There is not more dif- 
ference between the corpse of a friend and that friend him- 
self, with warm hand and eager eye, than between a world 
without God and one with him, than between mortality and 
immortality. We can sit in silence with the bereaved, but 
we can not deny that the world is bereft, that it grows cold, 
cheerless, rayless under the shadow of the gates of death. 
The scientist can not find or define life, he can not find 
or define the human soul, he can not find or define God, 
he can not prove immortality or define its conditions, be 
must then be left alone with his dead. He may say to 
himself, I have lost nothing. Life was but a process, an 
activity, and death, decay, are equally processes, activities ; 
processes as scientifically interesting and exact as those 
which took place in the living body of him whom I loved ; 
the universe without God is precisely in its laws what it 
would be with God, less only an intangible conception ; 
and the years to come, they are secured to the on-going 
of these forces into which I and those with me lapse 
again. Neither do I lose anything by death • it will only 
carry gently away, or sweep off with a stern but kind stroke, 



REVELATION. 2O3 

these anxieties and fears, the dread, that now oppress me. 
We can not so feel, nor can we so speak. Our desires 
have gone out toward a great, positive, growing good ; we 
yearn for a life lifted up in power. We have set up our 
plea for immortality in an imperishable, universal impulse, 
in faith, in the large truthfulness of God. This struggle 
for life decided against us, and we turn in despair, willing 
to hasten the inevitable. This battle of the soul gained, as 
it is for us gained, and, armed against perplexity, we wait 
on progress ; we seek the light, and we are walking toward 
the light. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

' Revelation. 

THERE are three heads under which what we have to 
say on revelation may readily appear ; first, why 
should there be a revelation ? second, what are its rela- 
tions to nature ? third, what are its relations to reason ? 
By revelation we understand a direct communication from 
God to man, one, therefore, in part at least transcending 
natural law. Why should there be such a communication? 
Nature we have seen to be the middle term between the 
Creator and his rational creatures, beings to be trained in 
knowledge, in power, and in concurrent action with each 
other and with himself. That nature should remain a fixed, 
inviolate ground is essential to . knowledge and to skill, to 
science and to civilization. To the degree sufficient for 
these ends it must be hemmed about and uninterfered 
with by any personal power that shall have the character 
of caprice, or bring relaxation orchange to the discipline 



204 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

entered on in it. Does this principle exclude intervention, 
revelation ? 

A belief in revelation presupposes a belief in God. 
The readiness with which such a revelation finds accept- 
ance, moreover, will have much to do with the character 
which is ascribed to him. Many will find no difficulty, others 
the greatest difficulty, with intervention, according to the 
balance in which they hold the natural and the personal, the 
necessary and the free, elements in God's government. A 
pantheistic deity, embodied in, and arrived at through, 
nature, gives no opportunity for direct revelation ; the 
nature and methods of God are already sufficiently defined 
under conditions adverse to revelation. No more does a 
divine being, arrived at by the exclusive study of natural 
law, though we may seem to have included in this concep- 
tion the personal element, push forward to direct inter- 
course with men. No philosophy of, necessity prepares the 
way for a personal disclosure of God. Fixed connections, 
secondary causes, fill the entire horizon. In proportion as 
the free, the personal, element is altered in character, or is 
lost sight of, will the difficulties accumulate against revela- 
tion, and the unfavorable presumptions grow apace. 

The steadfastness of the divine nature, the unity of the 
divine plan, the ' sufficiency and coherence of a single 
method, the reverence due the Infinite, the Unchangeable, 
will deter the mind, reaching God through the physical 
universe, from accepting interventions, modifications, 
special adjustments and after-thoughts. Yet reasonings of 
this kind are very unsafe, as they often spring from the 
rigidity and finiteness of our own conceptions, the barren- 
ness of our ideas, and not from any insight into the Divine 
Life. Tf the personal, the free, the spiritual, find full and 
hearty admission in our conception of human nature, they 
may well pass thence to the Divine Nature, as the best, the 



REVELATION. 205 

most comprehensive, the most explanatory of any thing 
we have at hand. 

We reason to the Infinite bearing with us the substance, 
the force, the beauty, the freedom of the finite, but casting 
off its restrictions. Having done this, we often surrepti- 
tiously start another argument of interpretation within the 
bosom of the Infinite himself, yet one whose data and con- 
clusions rest on the same limits of thought, the same logi- 
cal coherences, we have just set aside. By virtue of this 
reasoning, we expel from our conception of God that sub- 
stance of being which, in the first instance, we assigned 
him. Failing to grasp, either in imagination or by logical 
formula, the substance without its finite restrictions, we 
reason from the absence of these limits to the absence of 
that substance, and so furtively recede from the position 
already taken. We undo the idea we have once made up. 
We reached the Infinite in holding fast to the substance 
and casting off its limitations. These we now restore and 
so miss once more the Infinite. We may reason up to 
God, but can not carry our finite data into and through the 
forms of his life. W T e assign to him what we find coming 
from him, power, personality, liberty • but we must needs 
attribute them under new conditions, not as they are actual 
in the finite, but as they are potential in the Infinite. If 
we once do this, we must refuse to retreat, refuse to take 
back again the divine attributes, because we can no longer 
comprehend them under the interdependencies of the finite. 
As a fact we often concede liberty to God, and then remove 
all the conditions of its exercise, concede love and at once 
congeal it into law. We lock up all the activities of God 
in his omniscience, crowd them back into some beginning 
of things, when he fore knew and yfrr^-ordained. He that 
can fore-ordain can ordain. One moment of time is the 
type of every other. If we search for that first instant of 



206 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

thought and freedom, it too will vanish. If we concede 
personality for a single moment, we concede it for all 
moments. 

Revelation emphasizes the personal element in God, 
and gives it a position not otherwise attainable by it. 
Nature is thus made a midway term to God, who stands 
above and beyond it, who is in no way bound to it. It is 
inevitable that materialistic and pantheistic conceptions 
should gain ground on all others, if God is absolutely and 
forever veiled by natural law, and if his action at no point 
transcends it. Intervention, revelation, are requisite to 
restore him to his throne in the minds of men, to reseat 
him in personal strength over the universe which he sus- 
tains and rules. The uniformity of nature subserves a 
purpose, but has also a peculiar danger ; revelation sup- 
plements it, relieves it of its misapprehension and partial 
character, and enables it to fulfill safely spiritual ends as 
well as intellectual and physical ones. God is a person, 
and as a person free : personal manifestation ceases to be 
alien to him. There is no weakness in it, quite the reverse ; 
it is fitted to express a great truth, and put that truth in 
harmony with the wants of man. 

This it does. Man craves the personal as food for his 
affections, food that he can not sufficiently find in the 
wisest laws, or the most gracious regulations. This want, 
normal to the constitution of man, becomes a ground for 
revelation, constitutes a claim for it. The personal ele- 
ment in God makes answer to that element in man. Faith 
finds a faithful Creator, and love a bosom of love on which 
it can rest. The probability, the fitness of revelation, lie 
in this correlation, in the free, sympathetic natures of God 
and of man, in the personality found in both, and ready, on 
either side, to coalesce, in its own appropriate life. Reve- 
lation makes in the spiritual world an unspeakable differ- 



REVELATION. 207 

ence in man's emotional relations to God. Nature is 
instantly suffused with light and color where before it abode 
in darkness and coldness. 

Revelation brings also a needful confirmation to the 
deductions of reason, and adds thereto new force. It is 
almost impossible to look upon the rational world prima- 
rily as a field in which good and evil are waging a spiritual 
conflict, and not feel the need of, the certainty of, revelation, 
a clear manifestation of the mind of God to encourage and 
guide his own in a manner that submits itself cheerfully to 
their grade of spiritual powers. It may be said that such 
an argument proves too much, that if God intervenes at all, 
no reason can be given why he should not be supernatu- 
rally present everywhere, and sweep the field before him. 
The objection does not press the thoughtful mind. Divine 
action may be proportionate, we may concede to it this 
quality. Nature is full of God, is wisely ordered by him, 
affords an admirable discipline both spiritual and oppor- 
tune. Yet it is true that we can be aided in getting hold 
under this training by divine intervention, and it is not 
true that we can to advantage be lifted beyond its reach. 
We need constantly to be remanded to nature, but we go 
back to nature with a totally new apprehension of it, if we 
go forth from the presence of God. It so becomes to us in 
turn the revelation of God, and we walk wisely and lovingly 
with it. We are incarnate and must play between the 
physical and spiritual ; we can tarry exclusively with neither. 
The certainty which revelation, which the Christian Reve- 
lation, has affixed through many generations to the conclu- 
sions of innumerable devout minds, — conclusions winning 
the vigor of facts without being their final expression — the 
lustre it has given to old truths, and the brighter truths it 
has placed side by side with them, sufficiently show the 
value, the necessity, of revelation to those whose minds 



208 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

are open to these considerations. The Christian Revela- 
tion has given the one line of clear, glowing, growing spir- 
itual activity in the world's history. What it has done, 
that it was able to do, and for that it was given. 

Our second point is the relation of revelation, the 
Divine Word, to nature and natural law. The two are 
inseparably interlocked in every variety of way. Natural 
law, as disclosed in the physical conditions, the nature 
and the growth of man, and in the growth of society, is 
that on which and through which the supernatural element 
involved in revelation is ever acting. There is no depart- 
ure from nature in its general law, development ; this 
development under its permanent conditions is merely 
hastened by new, outside stimulus, which it could not by 
itself alone have realized. Revelation includes, must in- 
clude, at some point in some degree, a supernatural ele- 
ment ; but that divine force, that spoken word, is none the 
less operative on nature, on the heart of man, under 
natural law. The prophet proclaims the truth, and that 
truth takes its chances with men. The prophet himself, 
though his experiences may often transcend the powers 
of his own mind, and receive a living impulse from the 
spiritual world, grows by the law of growth contained in 
his own spirit, and under the conditions of his own expe- 
rience. Revelation is not a thrusting of nature down, but a 
more vigorous action induced in it, a restoration to it of a 
deeper spiritual consciousness. 

The life of Christ presents this union of the natural 
and supernatural in revelation in the most complete and 
powerful form, with the largest infusion of the spiritual 
and divine element. Yet here we have a life, that in its 
entire method of unfolding, in the vast majority of its in- 
cidents, and in its transcendent influence, subjects itself 
to natural law, keeps itself on the plane of nature. We 



REVELATION. 200 

have a new plant, but the soil in which it is rooted, the 
growth it achieves, the fruit it brings forth, indicate its per- 
fect loyalty to the nature that envelops it, its expenditure 
of divine force under the conditions assigned it by the 
existing environment. Thus only is revelation regenera- 
tive ; thus only is it not, as against a previous divine 
government, revolutionary. One jot or one tittle of the 
divine method does not pass away without fulfillment. A 
revelation is an incarnation, divine life at work in human 
forms. Herein is spiritual life the analogue of all life. 

The presumption in revelation is, in each single in- 
stance, in favor of the natural as against the supernatu- 
ral ; for the natural is the staple of method. But there 
is no reluctance in interpretation to accept the super- 
natural, rather a profound joy in it, if it be sufficiently estab- 
lished, if it illuminate that which it touches. In this 
opening of the mind to the higher influence, and in this 
definite expectation that it will be constantly sinking into, 
and acting under, the lower influence, lie the poise, com- 
posure and faith of the spirit working with God. Though 
the presumption is against the miraculous, is in favor of 
the natural, as more nearly level to man's necessity, yet the 
mind feels no violence done it in the manifestation which 
boldly transcends nature ; it delights in it rather as a more 
distinct disclosure of the Divine Presence, as proof that 
helps to gather up and confirm the lines of spiritual devel- 
opment followed by it, proof that the divine purpose above 
runs measurably parallel with the thoughts of men below, 
proof that lifts the weary soul, for one sweet moment, out 
of the abstract and intellectual into the concrete and 
emotional. 

The third inquiry is the relation of revelation to 
reason. Revelation submits itself to reason perfectly, as 
perfectly as does nature. In saying this we include in 



2IO A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

reason our entire intellectual and ethical constitution, and 
the emotional life incident to its healthy activity. Rev- 
elation is fitted to this constitution under the ordinary 
laws of apprehension and appropriation, and so is rational 
in the same way in which every truth or right method is 
rational. Religious belief is the acceptance of facts and 
principles for what they have shown themselves to be, and 
faith is the repose of our spiritual nature on personal, 
moral qualities whose existence and character have been 
sufficiently established for us. Faith is not called on to 
transcend its rational basis ; it is sufficient if, in religion 
as in society, it adheres to it. There is an historical force 
in the words, rationalist and rationalism, which we should 
be slow to accept as sufficiently expressing our convictions 
of the relations of revelation and reason, but in its inherent, 
derivative meaning the word, rational, covers the law of 
spiritual growth equally under nature and revelation. 
That growth is rational, that is according to the constitu- 
tion of man as a rational being ; and for it to be irrational 
is for it to be abortive. 

Revelation ministers to reason, because reason is God's 
first and fundamental gift to man, is the germ of his con- 
stitution, that which determines all that is to follow. 
For man to neglect or misapply reason, embracing as it 
does the light which enters through his entire constitution, 
and makes the law of that constitution apparent, is for 
him to be recreant to his first trust, disobedient in the 
most central and conspicuous way to the voice of God 
within him. No man wisely reverences God who does 
not delight in and honor the nature God has given him, 
who does not find in it the one germ and the one revela- 
tion of life, who does not desire its highest, most complete 
activity, who does not separate it from its present oppres- 
sive conditions, the disastrous issues that have overtaken 



REVELATION. 211 

it, and see by it and in it and through it the glory of God's 
thought present and to come. All other gifts of God are 
in reference to this gift, and find the fulfillment of their 
purpose in the development of man's spiritual powers. 
But his spiritual is also his rational nature. By reason we 
express the entire insight of the soul. It is certainly a 
mistaken reverence which bows reason, that by which God 
has made man upright, to irrational dogma or blind rite. 
This dogma can be to us truth only by our perception of 
it as such, or this rite can be to us duty only by its hold 
on the conscience. These are the sole points of healthy, 
living attachment to our free constitution, and to seek fof 
revelation any other attachment is to degrade it. Cer- 
tainly no secondary gift can, as a means of development, 
override our original constitution, or do any thing better 
for it than to unburden it and quicken it. If God gives 
an eye, an ear, an intuition of reason, then he submits 
color, sound, truth to them respectively. There is no 
reverence in insisting that black is white ; nor any more in 
affirming that the unjust and unintelligible are acceptable 
and profitable. Indeed to degrade the reason is to 
degrade all its affirmations. We must have a sound 
reason if we are to honor truth by any assertion whatever. 
An insane man can no more have an opinion for the truth 
than against it. A perverted and perverse nature taints 
its every dogma. The doctrine by which it creeps in the 
dust may be one of its least wholesome delusions. 

We urge the rightfulness of submitting revelation 
freely, fully, faithfully to reason, because of the futility of 
any other method. The soul can not be built up by what 
it does not understand, nor benefited by an obedience 
extorted from it. Truth has a double rational basis, one 
more and one less complete. The mind may so appre- 
hensively penetrate the truth as to understand and receive 



212 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

it solely on the authority of its own faculties. It may also 
accept the truth on the testimony of another, whose 
knowledge and character elicit confidence. One of these 
methods can not be made rationally to bear down the other. 
If there is any cdnflict between them, this conflict itself 
must be settled by reason. The relative weight of the 
two forms of evidence must, in each instance, be con- 
sidered, and if no balance can be struck between them, the 
mind must wait for further light. We may gladly accept 
truths concordant with reason on the grounds of revelation, 
but if truth so referred seems to contradict reason, it 
becomes a farther and deeper work of reason to reconcile 
the two, or to trace the error to its real source. Failing 
of sufficient light to do either the one or the other, it then 
becomes the office of reason to hold the judgment in abey- 
ance till the grounds of a conclusion are present. Reason 
thus rules, and rules equally in submitting itself to testi- 
mony as in withholding its assent. If the plainest princi- 
ples of our moral nature are violated by any act or precept 
made to rest upon revelation, reason does not at once 
abandon these principles, or submit them in haste to the 
new statement, but quietly recommits both for furthei 
consideration. It knows that it may misinterpret morality, 
but it knows also that it may misapprehend revelation. 
The claims of revelation can never be more absolute with 
it than those of that nature to which revelation is addressed. 
In other words, there is no point of will or power involved 
in the question, but simply reason and right, a reason 
that can be submitted to reason only. For the mind to 
accept an alleged revelation impromptu, as if there 
were more reverence or more submission in the act than 
in clinging" closely to its own moral constitution, and 
searching all claims, is for it to lay itself open to the most 
deadly mistake, for none can tell whither the blind will 



REVELATION. 213 

go. Reverence lies rather in standing fast where God 
first plants our feet, till we hear an unmistakable voice 
calling us thence. If we are ready for that voice it will 
not fail to return to us once, twice or three times, as to 
Samuel. The challenge of revelation is no more peremp- 
tory than that of reason. Our own convictions are God's 
first words to us, and to these we must unite all that he 
speaks later, or lose guidance, the clue of thought, and so 
lose life. No good can come to the soul, to the reason, to 
conscience by hastening or omitting any of the necessary 
steps of growth. Reason must be allowed the time requi- 
site to give us the grounds of belief, equally when we 
accept what it declares, and what it alone could not 
declare. This is faithfulness, to hold fast to God's work 
in our own souls. 

Nor can any rite or any preceptive obedience profit us, 
the reasons of which are hidden from us. Here also there 
is a double form of rational obedience ; one that rests on 
insight, and one that springs from authority, recognized 
as legitimate. Nor can one of these be allowed arbitrarily 
to overbear the other. We may obey God as God, if we 
are assured that the command is his, even though we do not 
understand the grounds of the action enjoined. Such 
obedience may be healthy and rational. But if the pre- 
cept referred to God makes plainly against our moral 
reason, the whole question of its authenticity is thereby 
reopened. A clear decision on the one side can not put 
out of court a like clear decision on the other ; the two 
must be readjudicated. The mind must wait for recon- 
ciliation, knowing that there is a mistake somewhere, 
since its conclusions are contradictory. To accept the pre- 
cept blindly, as if reverence lay in simple obedience, 
is to desert truth at one point and offer it allegiance at 
another. The desertion is blind, and the allegiance is 



214 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

blind, and both are rationally worthless. The life con- 
structed on such a principle is laid open to accident, "and 
to the most blameworthy excess. We are at loss to see 
the first advantage accruing to truth from such a break- 
down of reason, such an irrational submission to authority. 
There is in it the utmost danger. We know historically that 
sincere and insincere, sane and insane men, have in every 
form and in every way set up their own ideas and commands 
as those of God, and that God's service has so become 
again and again a brutish, brutal and revolting tyranny. 
The mind, the conscience that fail themselves can find 
no other safe anchorage ; they may be blown any whither. 
If they come to good they know not of it, if they fall intp 
evil they suffer from it in the most fatal form. Obedience 
is good, but only obedience to legitimate authority ; and 
this legitimacy rests on comprehension, not assertion. 
Nor are these questions that can be settled in a general 
way to the oversight of particulars. The revelation as a 
whole and each of its parts are under inquiry. 

Again, we submit the Scriptures to reason, because 
only thus can they accomplish their full purpose. What is 
that purpose ? To quicken, guide, renew, nourish the 
human soul. For this end they must be understood, 
penetrate thought and be penetrated by it, fed upon by 
the rootlets of reflection and emotion. The more freely 
they are submitted to the mind and conscience, the more 
faithfully they are searched, the more direct, universal and 
loving will be their influence. Mistakes of course will be 
made, but certainly no graver mistakes than are sure to 
accompany the opposite method, and mistakes that will 
be more quickly and healthily corrected, because of the 
free inquiry which accompanies them. It is the very pur- 
pose of the Scriptures to instruct and train men, and 
instruction and training call for liberty, for reason, bound 



REVELATION. 215 

not by one or another limit, but only by those limits which 
it sets itself. Reason is not partly good and partly bad, 
right in one measure and wrong in another. Reason is 
always and wholly good ; it is unreason that is mischievous. 
Reason best rids itself of unreason, of the parasites of error, 
by vigorous, patient activity, by sound health. Thus is it 
exercised to discern good and evil. Its holiest and most in- 
vigorating life is found when directed in a searching, which 
is a reverent, temper toward the Word of God. God gives 
a pure atmosphere to the inhalation of the most unwhole- 
some lungs, a richly colored world to short-sighted and 
blear-eyed vision ; and equally he gives his truth to all to 
use it as they can, bowing it to the weakest. In our sev- 
eral measures of apprehension lie our possibilities of life. 
It does not give more insight to suppress that we have. 
Man is often found in a bad case, calls for help on every 
side, yet he must in the end see and live by his own powers. 
The word of God must at length be left with him, as light 
and heat with the tender blade. 

This freedom of handling and use, even of revelation, 
belongs to man, because only thus can individual life be 
maintained. The authoritative interpretation to which the 
reason is called to submit is the rendering of another. 
The church, the synod, the theologian have pronounced so 
and so, and therefore the individual is to distrust his own 
conclusion, and accept a current conviction. This accumu- 
lated force which gathers about a conventional statement, 
rising up to hush and subdue the individual mind, is not 
one which springs from individual thought, it is directly 
opposed to it. The faith offered first shot up in the indi- 
vidual soul, and then possessed its maximum power for 
good. From that time on, as cast and recast in the same 
way into the same soil, it has exhausted that soil, and made 
it increasingly barren. The conventional certainty, which 



2l6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

slowly displaces the certainty of conviction, is nothing but 
the decay of individuality, of life. Calvin may think freely, 
and reason logically for himself. Herein he adopts our 
principle. But when he sets up his results, or others set 
them up after him, as in any way limits of thought, he and 
they violate the very principle, the very liberty by which 
every good contained in his dogmas was reached, the only 
principle by which it can be retained. The religious 
life of the individual can be won and maintained on 
no easier grounds than this, of faithful, cogent, inde- 
pendent activity ; and the degree of life will be the degree 
of this activity. Inquiry he must certainly be allowed, and 
shall not this inquiry be thorough and complete ? Is not 
this to submit all questions to reason ? There is here an 
opportunity for confused statement and confused results, 
but hardly for two opinions. 

We may appeal to the Bible, but our appeal will wholly 
miscarry, if it is not accompanied with the right of inter- 
pretation, of the wisest and most comprehensive rendering ; 
if reason is not to have its largest way in it. On any other 
condition, our allegiance to the Bible will be our allegiance 
to the exegete who has expounded it for us, the theologian 
who has formulated it in dogma. We may as well allow 
a church and a pope to crowd in between us and truth, and 
accept graciously the charity of their giving, as to allow a 
Calvin or a creed to do the same thing. Nay, the church 
is preferable, is the more august and historic power, the 
more composite and flexible force, one in some slow way 
capable of growth. We must ourselves inquire, or we 
bring our ears, sooner or later, to the doorpost of a mas- 
ter. If we inquire, we must do it boldly, faithfully, and 
this is to submit revelation in authenticity, interpretation, 
application, to reason ; is to use revelation, not to be used 



REVELATION. 217 

by it, or by those who in one way or another set up a 
special ownership in it. 

Such a submission is the condition of all reform. 
Reform is the breaking away of the individual reason from 
the traditional force of revelation, a breaking through the 
incrustations of assertion that have enclosed it. Reform, 
because it is reform, claims the right to judge, and sets 
itself to the task of judging, both as to what is revelation, 
and how revelation is to be understood. This is shown 
in the easy way in which Luther set aside a distasteful 
epistle. Let reform hesitate in this work, let it stop any- 
where short of the end, and the adversary, recovering 
courage, will quickly drive it to the wall. If in the exi- 
gency the reformer dare not trust his reason, announce his 
grounds and stand on them, he far better tarry in the 
camp ; he can never make a camp of his own, and is but 
an outcast. No one can muster as many or as respectable 
or as cogent authorities for a new faith as his adversaries 
for the old one. Reason is the only refuge of reform. If 
authority is in any way to be admitted, then Catholicism 
has an incalculable advantage, stretching broadly over 
every Christian century and in solid continuity through 
them all. It is not to the Bible, unestablished, uninter- 
preted, unapplied, that the reformer appeals, it is to his 
knowledge and use of it, and this knowledge and use 
stand or fall by the reason that is in them, and by nothing 
else. 

There the reformer must be content to stand or not to 
stand at all ; on this basis of freedom alone can we prop- 
erly accept him. It is surprising with what zeal we give 
in our adhesion to a first reformer, and with what bitter- 
ness we reject a second, forgetful that the guarantee of the 
one is the guarantee of the other. We hear with enthu- 
siasm the declaration of Paui, all things are lawful for me, 
II 



2l8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

and then proceed to make the least letter of precept that 
has fallen from his lips, though it pertain exclusively to 
forms, a constraining law to us. We insist on the bonds of 
our slavery, and compel the champions of freedom to forge 
them for us, taking them with peculiar gratitude from 
their hands. 

The highest obligation and the highest reverence are 
also involved in this reference of religious truth to reason. 
None are under the pressure of so many motives as those 
who accept for themselves the entire responsibility of 
faith and action. Every other position is one of relief and 
escape compared with this. There is also no such rever- 
ential use of the truth as a bold use of it. No other use 
implies the same confidence in it. A timid suppressing 
of inquiry is the mark of distrust and fear. If we deeply 
reverence God's Word, we shall not fear any sincere, 
thorough search into it, any sufficient test of its claims. 
Its flexibility, its growth, its enlarged adaptations will 
delight us. It is only narrow, fragile dogma that will not 
bear the bold, strong hand. If we reverence our own 
powers, — God's gifts, the coordinates of knowledge — if we 
are confident in his truth, we shall put the two in the most 
living interaction, secure of the results. And this is rever- 
ence by which we draw near to God instead of standing 
in fear afar off, ascend the mount instead of halting at its 
base amazed. 

See also how this reverence reacts on the sense of 
obligation. From the moment the reason submits itself 
blindly to authority, its functions are at an end ; its obliga- 
tions are statical not dynamical. This reverence for the 
truth keeps every faculty alert. No soul breathes a more 
vigorous, vital moral atmosphere, one more alive with 
liberty and responsibility, than he who seeks enlarged 
apprehension, praying God that he may find it. 



REVELATION. 219 

The Word of God also increasingly, as men have been 
able to accept the trust, has committed itself to their in- 
quiries. In the Old Testament authority is uppermost. 
Reason looks abroad before it looks to itself. It is ra- 
tional that it should. Feeble, fragmentary, immature in 
its own judgments, it rightly desires guidance, and finds 
its first exercise in seeking and accepting instruction. 
The discipline of rites and positive precepts which charac- 
terizes the Old Testament is neither an irrational meth- 
od, nor one in neglect of reason. It stands in adaptation 
to incipient, germinant thought, to infantile and child- 
like stages of growth. In the New Testament, addressed 
to those somewhat more mature in religious thought, who 
had exhausted the disciplinary power of one dispensation, 
the appeal to the conscience, the reason, of the individual 
is most direct. The great characteristic of our Saviour's 
instructions is a want of deference to existing authorities, 
the enunciation of principles which call for the most wise, 
patient thought, either to understand them or use them — 
principles that can not only be misunderstood, but are 
almost sure to be misunderstood, by every hasty or timid 
or trammeled mind. His ever returning formula of exhor- 
tation is, He that hath ears to hear let him hear. An 
earnest calling up of powers is the first condition of dis- 
cipleship. Wisdom is justified of her children. It is im- 
possible to justify wise ways otherwise than by wise 
thoughts about them. Add to this the exhortation, Search 
the Scriptures, with the farther assertion of Paul, The letter 
killeth and the spirit giveth life, and we have not merely 
the fullest warrant for the fullest use of our powers, that 
is, for bringing all things as we are able to the test of rea- 
son, but the opening effort of obedience is put in this very 
work. Prove all things, hold fast that which is good. Try 
the spirits whether they are of God. 



220 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

The test of faith applied to Abraham may seem in 
direct contradiction to the view now taken, and to imply 
quite another method on the part of God. The command 
to sacrifice Isaac was in contravention of what we now at 
least regard as the plainest morality, and would be fitted, 
therefore, no matter how clearly given, to stagger and be- 
wilder the mind, placing it between opposite and equally 
enforced commands, the one resting on the law of God in 
the conscience, and the other on revelation. The mind 
would thus be distracted between reason and authority, 
and must needs stand still where the dilemma found it. 
To such a degree is this the bearing of the transaction, 
that we regard it morally, as it is historically, quite ex- 
ceptional ; one that takes its flavor from the time and 
circumstances. No revelation can, in its precepts, violate 
the decalogue, and yet bind us to obedience. 

The reasons are two. No commands of God can be 
more fundamental or better supported than those of the 
decalogue. A command in opposition to any of them 
could only bewilder our judgment, and strike from under 
us all grounds of belief. We should be in the position of 
one who had received from a military commander instruc- 
tions that were, under no circumstances, to be departed 
from, and was shortly after enjoined a line of action in 
direct disregard of them. He would be unable to say 
whether the second order was intended to test his faithful- 
ness to the first, or was designed to supersede it. Let one 
command be clear, explicit, without conditions, and a 
second command resting on a like basis can secure no 
authority over it. Authority as authority is as good at one 
point as at another ; while the moral injunction is aided 
in its proof by our entire experience, and the positive in- 
junction is in a like degree obscured. 

We ought not, also, to obey the second as opposed to 



REVELATION. 221 

the first, because mere authority, no matter how well estab- 
lished, can not reverse moral quality, nor maintain itself 
as opposed to it. Our moral nature underlies positive com- 
mand, not the reverse. God's commands owe their hold 
upon us to the response which his government meets with 
in our moral constitution, andean not be used, in a single 
instance, to subvert this only seat of authority. If God's 
will becomes an unrighteous will, I am bound to resist it. 
In all obedience I must look to the moral quality and con- 
ditions of obedience, as the forces alone which give it any 
merit. Thus only is virtue virtue, with a power to train 
and elevate, to carry one forward in an increasingly intel- 
ligent and holy service. The justice, the morality of an 
action are absolutely essential to the proof that it is the 
will of a righteous God, while its injustice forbids such 
proof. No principle can be safer than this. 

How, then, are we to regard this command to Abraham ? 
It was given on a lower plane of intelligence and training 
than the one involved in our discussion. The element of 
reasonable authority was in some way clearly present to 
the mind of Abraham, and the counter-voice of his moral 
nature, being very indistinct or wholly wanting, the con- 
flict lay, not between duty and duty, but between duty and 
affection. So the command became a test of faith and a 
means of its discipline. The method was simply not 
controlled by considerations foreign to the case. Abraham 
was treated with the measure of rationality that falls to the 
control of a child, because he was a child. The conflict in 
his mind was regarded as being exactly what it was, one of 
reverence with inclination. The example has no authority 
beyond its own narrow field. 

Dr. Hodge, in speaking of the relation of reason and 
revelation, says, " Philosophy seeks to attain knowledge by 
speculation and induction, or by the exercise of our jntel- 



222 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

lectual faculties. Theology relies upon authority, receiving 
as truth what God in his word has revealed."* If this were 
the whole truth or the chief part of it, if reason were the 
binding power in nature, and authority in revelation, then 
would revelation enter in instant arrest of those methods 
of growth it found current, would put itself in conflict with 
the normal development of our ethical constitution in its 
passage from positive authority to pure morality, from the 
rule of others to its own rule, from darkness to light. 
Prior to revelation, inquiry, thought, comparison were at 
least partially in order, and remain in order in all lower 
fields of knowledge as the preparation and ground of action, 
but revelation being present, the mind is made submissive 
to the letter and blind to the spirit and scope of its injunc- 
tions. This is retreat not progress, a pressing of men 
backward not forward in development. Moreover, if the 
command is to be interpreted, if its authority is to be ex- 
tended and harmonized, then reason must be called in to 
correlate action under it. Collisions can not be overlooked, 
nor contradictions left unreconciled ; and this is to set up 
again the tribunal of reason within the precincts of author- 
ity. No matter what the revelation, or how decisive, it must 
find application through a truly wise, free, constructive, 
judicial thought. Why so anxious then to explode a reason 
which must instantly reappear. Reason is chastened to 
a holy service, not by scourging but by encouragement. 
Flagellations avail no more with it than with the body. 

He says farther, " Men know unspeakably more than 
they understand. "f This is true under any view. Authority 
is ample to announce and to support merely the unknown ; 
but the relation of the unknown to the known is open to 
the discussion of reason. If what is presented to-day as 
knowledge subverts the knowledge of yesterday, then must 
* Systematic Theology, vol. i. p. 56. f Ibid, p. 50. 



REVELATION. 223 

we settle opposing claims, otherwise knowledge becomes 
contradictory and futile. " We must make our choice 
between the wisdom of man and the wisdom of God."'* 
How ? By accepting that as the wisdom of God which 
seems to us to be irrational, and rejecting that which has 
in it the force and light of reason as being the wisdom of 
men ? Is it no evidence against that which is offered as 
divine wisdom that it is out of harmony with human 
thought; obscure, contradictory and unjust? Of what 
worth would such wisdom be that, failing to guide the 
mind, confuses and bewilders it ? Can we really be fed 
spiritually on absurdities and injustice if only they are 
ascribed to God ? Certainly we are to accept the wisdom 
of God as against the wisdom of men, because in this 
opposition the wisdom of men ceases to be wisdom. This 
is the reason and the sole reason of its rejection. The 
wisdom of God includes, gathers up the true wisdom of 
men, and finds its proof in that fact. We are in search of 
the wisdom of God, are we therefore to take it to be folly ? 
The question is always pressing for an answer, What is 
the wisdom of God ? To the sincere mind its fundamental 
evidence must be its power to give light. Unrighteousness 
and irrationality show misapprehension ; righteousness and 
rationality, apprehension. It is calling light darkness and 
darkness light to assert otherwise. Reason does not 
exclude the acceptance of the obscure and the unknown. 
It can wait long on the process of interpretation and recon- 
ciliation, but it can not fail to regard harmony and ration- 
ality as criteria of truth. To do this would be to cripple 
all the fleet steeds of thought. Religious truth stands on 
no other footing than that of truth. 

We offer one more reason for this direct, unreserved 
inquiry into revelation, testing its truths, applying its prin- 
* Systematic Theology, p. 59. 



224 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ciples and throwing it as new material into accord with old 
convictions, with such mutual modifications as are wont 
to spring up. Theologians, all active, thoughtful men, are 
doing this very thing, no matter how staunchly they may 
deny its rightfulness. A system of theology is never 
offered which does not contain to a large extent this ele- 
ment of human reason, which does not owe its peculiarities 
to it. Far better is it that each system should stand, or 
struggle to stand, in reason than in unreason. In what 
sense is one system of Christian theology Biblical as op- 
posed to another ? Only in this sense, that its authors 
and defenders assert it to be so, and offer that assertion to 
us to be passed upon. Such claims can be decided only 
by reason, a reason that boldly canvasses and thoroughly 
reviews all methods. Has it not been just such an action 
that has led the dogmatic theologian to settle on his own 
representation as correct ? If it has not, do the narrow- 
ness of his inquiry, the restricted nature of his reasoning, 
reflect probability or improbability on his views? The 
thought and heart of Dr. Hodge are in his system of the- 
ology, and we get not a ray of divine light save as it 
filters down to us through these media. Be the interpret- 
ing conceptions opaque or transparent, clear or murky, 
there they are to challenge the light that enters. He who 
goes to this or to any teacher, must judge his assertions, 
or be blindly led by them. To study the Bible otherwise 
than through our own apprehension of truth and right is 
impossible, and every effort toward it is one which ap- 
proaches the deadness of the letter, not the life of the 
spirit ; that strives to give its words unmistakable mean- 
ings aside from a fresh, living rendering of them in the 
souls of men. Ordinary honesty, then, calls upon us to 
do avowedly what we all are doing, to stand each by his 
system, not saying This is the truth of God, this is his 



MIRACLES. 2 25 

word ; but, This is my apprehension of that truth, my inter- 
pretation of that word. In the degree in which this is 
more honest, is it also more wholesome. I fear not to be 
condemned before God as having too boldly, too earnestly 
sought the truth, as having submitted myself to it implicit- 
ly, — and there is no submission to the truth but that of 
reason — I only fear lest too lazily, too authoritatively, too 
unkindly, too obstinately, I may have uttered idle or par- 
tial or irresponsible or harsh words, and said of them, 
These are the words of God, by this faith we must live or 
die. Nay, indeed, each soul lives before God, and God 
helps it to live. Our sin is that we do not gently give it a 
cup of cold water in its weary travels, ministering in the 
little wherein we can minister. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Miracles. 



r]~^HE discussion of miracles follows naturally upon 
JL revelation, since it is a distinctive feature of reve- 
lation that it involves the supernatural, and is accompanied 
by it as a proof of authority. Words not confirmed by 
miracle, nor in themselves including the supernatural, 
would come under the truths of natural religion, accessible 
to the normal action of the human mind. A revelation as 
a revelation, as a distinct divine declaration, must sustain 
itself either by the presence of an obviously supernatural 
insight, or be sealed under the hand of God by a miracle. 
Nothing which pertains to Christianity has in our time 
been more distasteful than miracles. Many look upon 
them with a repugnance which no measure of proof can over- 



226 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

come. Any fact in the line of nature would be substantiated 
by a fraction of the evidence for miracles furnished by the 
New Testament. This proof fails to convince us because 
of a stubborn prejudgment. We need, therefore, to see 
what the miracle is, and what are the presumptions against 
it, before we can decide whether it simply calls for excep_ 
tionally clear evidence, or is wholly incapable of proof. 

A miracle is an event which transcends, in some way 
exceeds or contravenes, the natural forces then and there 
present. It implies, therefore, plainly the intervention in 
nature of a power superior to it ; this is its moral signifi- 
cance. Without this to support it, it must certainly and 
perfectly fail. To refer the miracle to a previously unknown 
law of nature is, in the advocate of miracles, cowardly 
and weak. It is cowardly, if used as an evasion of the 
difficulty involved in the intervention of God ; for this 
intervention is the thing to be defended, the citadel of the 
position. It is weak, if it be thought to afford any relief 
to theperplexities of the question. If the approach of the 
strange, apparently supernatural, but really natural, event 
is known in the way of ordinary knowledge, to the proph- 
et or the apostle who employs it, he immediately be- 
comes a deceiver. Instead of sustaining the truth of his 
present message, he loses his own personal truthfulness. 
If the event is known to him by divine revelation, then 
the miracle is transferred from the event itself to his 
knowledge of it, and remains at that point a miracle, beset 
with the first difficulty. Miracles must be boldly asserted 
or boldly denied ; there is no possible compromise. 
Science or revelation must succumb. 

The word supernatural has usually been used as equiv- 
alent to the miraculous. Bushnell has drawn attention 
vigorously to what he terms the supernatural element in 
man. He thus allies volition in its relation to nature to 



MIRACLES. 227 

the miraculous. The point he makes is one of great im- 
portance, but volition needs none the less to be distin- 
guished from the miracle. It helps us, indeed, to under- 
stand and to accept the miracle, but is by no means equiv- 
alent to it. Were we not believers in liberty, in choice, we 
should have no such conception of God and of his re- 
lations to nature as would give grounds for a miracle. 
Volition does lay hold of the physical forces present, and 
use them for ends beyond themselves. There is, however, 
so far as we know, no force added to them by choice. 
Choice assigns their direction, determines their instant, 
their degree, of action, but gives them no new resources of 
vigor. The forces are there present to be expended, and 
are capable of expenditure in different degrees and ways. 
The form and measure of this possible expenditure are 
determined by volition, and this without the introduction 
of a new force, or loss of an old one. The method is 
inscrutable, but the fact we believe in. While volition, 
therefore, rises entirely above an ordinary physical event, 
necessary in inception and execution, it is yet clearly dis- 
tinguished from a miracle. There are present to volition 
nervous and muscular conditions which quite hedge about 
its powers. Brain and muscle are a part of nature, and 
play perfectly under her laws. In the miracle, no such 
well-defined and well-understood adaptations, no known 
mechanisms, wait on the will of the Creator. Means dis- 
appear before the direct stroke of volition. To assume 
their presence is to imply facts as obscure as the miracle 
itself. The miracle discloses a force new among the forces 
present, and superior to them, while volition is strictly 
confined to those forces as plainly lodged in a given 
organization. The miracle is thus an act different in kind 
from choice, since it proceeds without physical means ; 
nor is it at all restrained by those present. Miracles 



228 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

must be decidedly separated from acts of volition, and 
whether we do well to include the latter with them under 
the word supernatural seems doubtful. Such a use is liable 
to aid in confusing the distinction just made, and thus in 
obscuring the general argument for miracles. Moreover, if 
we so employ words, we immediately sink the word nature 
to physical nature, physical forces, and exclude from it 
man's intellectual, spiritual powers. In reference to these, 
spontaneity, liberty are not supernatural but natural. In 
discussion also with necessitarians, we have a terminology 
which is to them jargon, since they admit of no difference 
in intrinsic connection, between an act of choice and a 
physical event. They could not go with us in our new 
use of words, and would be quite likely to misapprehend 
it, altering the notion of choice to suit the word super- 
natural, rather than bowing this to its new service. It 
seems well then to leave the supernatural and the miracu- 
lous as one class, and to claim within nature, within the 
lines defined by a determinate constitution, a radical 
division of events, one branch of which serves to antici- 
pate and make way for divine intervention. Man inter- 
venes in physical nature under fixed limitations exterior to 
his own choice. God intervenes on terms unknown and 
unrestrained. 

We shall speak first of the objections to miracles, and 
afterward of their proof and relations. It is impossible, in 
a few quotations, adequately to express the depth of 
that sentiment against miracles which, gathering force 
for years, has now taken undisputed possession of 
many minds. Spinoza held miracles to be impossible, 
as he thought a departure from the established laws 
of the universe to be derogatory. We well know what 
an opponent they found in Hume. Strauss, in the spirit 
of Spinoza, says, " For God to operate against a natural 



MIRACLES. 22Q 

law is to operate against himself." * In a more passionate 
temper he affirms, " He who wants to clear the parsons 
out of the church must first clear miracles out of reli- 
gion, "f Here is an end with its method quite distinctly 
defined. M. Guizot speaks of miracles as a chief diffi- 
culty of the Christian system. It was a most invincible 
antecedent conviction which led Renan to the explanation 
of miracles presented in his Life of Christ. This unbelief 
accompanies in Renan a strong faith-element, and earn- 
est inquiry. Says he, " Far from leading to denial, the 
philosophical history of religion leads to belief by showing 
humanity's constant faith in a heavenly principle and a 
supreme order — not to the belief which, by gross symbols, 
materializes its object, but to that which requires no assent 
to the supernatural in order to seize the ideal ; to that 
which, to borrow the thought of St. Augustine, sees divinity 
better in the immutable order of things than in deviation 
from the eternal order." t The strength of Renan's aver- 
sion is brought out in the following passage : " Criticism 
has two modes of attacking a marvellous narrative ; for, as 
to accepting it as it stands, it can not think of it; since its 
essence is denial of the supernatural" § 

The miracle is here looked on as obviously, undenia- 
bly antagonistic to reason. The ease with which he would 
allow an a priori emotion to dispose of alleged miraculous 
facts is shown in the assertion, " If, before this theory 
can be rejected, it were necessary to arrive at a rational 
opinion on so many really diverse facts, few men would 
have the right to disbelieve in the supernatural." 1T The 
supernatural thus at once disproves itself, no matter with 
what historic facts and divine truths it may be united. " In 

* History of Rationalism, Hurst, p. 277. 

f Ibid, p. 276. % Religious History and Criticism, p. 52. 

§ Ibid, p. 17. \ Ibid, p. 227. 



230 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

truth, in this path, it is the first step only which costs ; 
there is no use in haggling over the supernatural." * To 
accept any miracle is such a denial of reason that we may 
after that give easy place to anything. 

The Essays and Reviews show how far the same feeling, 
has penetrated among men, by affiliation of belief adverse 
to it. " From the nature of our antecedent convictions the 
probability of some kind of mistake or deception somewhere 
though we know not where, is greater than the proba- 
bility of the event really happening in the way and from 
the causes assigned." f 

This is an opinion wholly at one with that of Hume. 
" If miracles were, in the estimate of a former age, among 
the chief supports of Christianity, they are at present 
among the main difficulties and hindrances to its accept- 
ance." % 

Says Arnold, in his work on Literature and Dogma. 
" It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of 
the human mind to take miracles as evidence ; or the 
extent to which religion, and religion of a true and admir- 
able kind, has been, and still is, held in connection with a 
reliance on miracles. . . And yet the human mind is 
assuredly passing away, however slowly, from this hold of 
reliance also ; and those who make it their stay will more and 
more find it fail them, will be more and more disturbed, 
shaken, distressed and bewildered. For it is what is called 
the Time-Spirit that is sapping the proof from miracles — it is 
the Zeit-Geist itself. Whether we attack them or whether 
we defend them does not much matter ; the human mind 
as its experience widens, is turning away from them." § 

This aversion to miracles, for it is quite other and much 
more than a cold conviction, is seen, from these quotations, 

* Religious History and Criticism, 312. f p, 120. 

% Ibid, p. 158. § p. 125. 



MIRACLES. 231 

to have penetrated into philosophy, theology, criticism, 
literature ; to be making its way in every direction of ear- 
nest inquiry. Still more does it belong to science. It is 
the pressure of scientific thought which leads writers, like 
the Duke of Argyle, to make what we must regard as the 
very futile effort to include and cover the supernatural 
with the natural, and to save the distinctive features of a 
personal divine government under the reign of natural law. 
The supernatural and the natural can not coalesce in one 
fact. One of the writers of the Essays and Reviews 
regards the scientific spirit as an essential requisite for the 
discussion of miracles ; doubtless it is for the destruction 
of miracles. " It is for the most part hazardous ground 
for any general moral reasoner to take to discuss subjects 
of evidence which essentially involve that higher applica- 
tion of physical truth which can be attained only from 
accurate and comprehensive acquaintance with the con- 
nected series of the physical and mathematical sciences."* 
Is it not still more hazardous to handle these questions 
with no penetrative hold on philosophy, or on the dis- 
tinctive features of religious action? To such an extent 
has this unbelief in miracles become an axiom with sci- 
entists, that the youngest writer on these topics has his 
ready fling, as occasion answers, at the obnoxious faith, 
" He flies at once to that refuge of inconsequent and timid 
m i n ds — miracles. ' f 

We by no means fail to feel the vast pressure of ear- 
nest and sincere and sound thought which lies back of this 
rejection of miracles. We recognize the weight and vol- 
ume of these obtruding glacier columns of cold unbelief 
that come creeping down upon us in these sunless periods 

* P. 151. 

f Popular Science Monthly, No. 18, p. 700. 



232 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

of our spiritual life. Nor is the power of the Time-spirit 
hidden from us ; yet we should fear it more thoroughly did 
we not know whose loins have travailed with it, how it 
came to its birth. We should be more apprehensive from 
the prevalent unbelief could we not assign the reasons of 
its growth, reasons which by no means justify it, but 
rather disclose it as an extreme point in the arc of oscilla- 
tion. We can still lay, or think we can, the foundations 
of a philosophy in which the Time-spirit plays no such 
part, has no such power of upheaval, as that conceded it. 
We should not venture to rest the argument for miracles 
on the purely historic proof. Strong as this is, it needs 
the support of a fitness in the nature of the world, a fitness 
in the human and divine nature, for the presence of the 
miracle. Without this fitness, without an intellectual con- 
stitution which calls for intervention, without a philosophy 
in sympathy with it, we should yield this conflict. It is 
too late in the correlation of forces easily to accept anything 
new in principle. The difficulty does not lie in the weak- 
ness of the historic proof, but in the fact that no proof of 
this kind can stand successfully against the permanent 
drift of science and philosophy. Outstanding points must 
give way to fixed currents. There is such a thing as mas- 
siveness, weight, in intellectual as in physical movement, in 
evidence as in force. 

These objections to miracles have grounds ; they rest 
back on principles that have been working their way rap- 
idly into human thought for the last three centuries. The 
chief root of unbelief penetrates far back into the Lockian 
Philosophy of experience. If all knowledge is empirical, 
then the miracle is doomed, and with-it the being of God, 
and the government of God, farther than these are con- 
tained in and expressed by nature. What Morell says in 
his Philosophy of Religion is indubitable. If we are to 



MIRACLES. 233 

deal with the supernatural, " we must appeal to some 
standard higher than that which results from mere induc- 
tive procedure, and employ a method of research very dif- 
ferent from the Baconian Organum."* 

We believe a false, a partial, a superficial philosophy 
to be responsible for the prevalent sentiment against 
miracles. It is, therefore, only one vibration in human 
thought, correcting much, modifying much, yielding much, 
but one which, having done its work, can not itself remain. 
The empirical philosophy, the cosmic philosophy, must in 
each and all of its phases be found in settled antagonism 
to spiritual truth. We can not here refute it, we have 
striven to do it elsewhere ; we only point out its precise 
bearings on the question before us. It makes no pro- 
vision for liberty, it can make none. Liberty must take 
rank among unverified notions, since it is not a product of 
experience, but an idea we bring to the interpretation of 
experience. An empirical philosophy can do nothing with 
the rational and rationalizing elements of thought ; it can 
only busy itself with inductions, with arranging the facts 
of sensation. Its inquiries — if within the scope of its own 
principles — begin and end all of them in the dust-heap ; 
and the principles, the ideas by which it there introduces 
order are filchings which it hides from itself. It steals the 
notion of cause and effect, and rejects that of liberty lying 
side by side with it in the human mind. But without lib-* 
erty — a thing not so much as suggested either in the reg- 
ular on-going or the by-play of matter — there is no oppor- 
tunity for a personal God, and no opportunity for miracles. 
Miracles are necessarily and absolutely excluded, since the 
principle of causation, pronounced universal, can not rec- 
ognize them. Those who build consciously or uncon- 
sciously on such a philosophy must say, "A great Per- 

* P. 379- 



234 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

sonal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of 
the universe, can never be verified."* 

If we go down and back with our philosophy, and cut 
the roots of thought, we must expect the topmost branches 
to wither ; we are not, therefore, at liberty to affirm, There 
is no fitness in them ; the plant is changing its habit. 
Miracles are dependent on God, and God, as a personal 
being, calls for the conception of liberty, and liberty is a 
transcendental truth of reason, a product of insight. We 
have loosened foundation stones of thought in denying the 
rational intuitions, and slowly, as the want of support is 
felt, the superstructure crumbles. Let us understand this 
fact, and refer it to our own folly, not to the Time-spirit. 
There are many Anti-Christs, many false Time-spirits; 
that alone is the true Time-spirit which is the truth. 

Observe how much is swept away with this unverified 
idea of a personal God. We have trouble with personality 
in God because we have trouble with personality in our- 
selves, are perplexed by its constituents, have subjected 
its elements to analysis side by side with those of matter, 
and have rejected every non-conformable feature. Hence 
we have lost not God only as an object of belief, but man as 
well. Says Arnold, — striving to hold on to religion though 
he has set aside the personality of God as unverifiable — 
" When we are asked, What is the object of religion ? let us 
reply, Conduct And when we are asked farther, What is con- 
duct ? let us answer, Three-fourths of life."f Very well, but 
what is conduct without liberty? It is so impossible for us, 
even in thought, for an instant, to eliminate the free, personal 
element in character, that having denied it in theory, we 
go straight forward to construct conduct, character, society 
as if we had said nothing on the subject. But without lib- 
erty conduct is an unmanageable series of physical events, 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 9. f Ibid, p. 44. 



MIRACLES. 235 

a necessary sequence with no more significance than the 
physical series which under one and the same law are 
progressing side by side with it. The notions of potency, 
opportunity, responsibility are ambient images, shadows 
that cling strangely enough to the facts, a glorified mist 
that envelops them, but have no more to do with their 
character and control than the clouds lingering on moun- 
tain summits have to do with the rocks beneath them. 
The Time-spirit, standing for the merely logical coherence 
of necessary truth, will have to do with each of these con- 
ceptions in their order, will disperse them one after another 
as lacking verifiable being. What then will become of 
conduct? Having lost the one-fourth part of foundation 
truth, it, the three-fourths part of superstructure, will 
disappear. 

Suppose with Arnold we call that law in things about 
us, in the "not-ourselves," by which they tend to estab- 
lish and maintain order, God, what have we gained ? The 
word has not enlarged the fact ; we still have laws, tenden- 
cies, nothing more ; and therein the basis of prudence, not 
of religion. We accept his statement of the transforma- 
tion of morality into religion as arising by the addition of 
emotions. 

" The true meaning of religion is thus not simply 
morality, but morality touched by emotion. And this new 
elevation and inspiration of morality is well marked by the 
word ' righteousness.' Conduct is the word of common 
life, morality is the word of philosophical designation, 
righteousness is the word of religion." * 

But this transition from philosophy to religion without 
new ideas as the grounds of the emotion which is to char- 
acterize it, is impossible. No such ideas are given by 
Arnold, nay, they are denied rather. Law and order, 

* Literature and Dogma, p. 46. 



236 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

firmly fastened in the " not -ourselves" are the basis of 
philosophy, not of religion, of thought rather than emotion. 
These yield what Arnold terms morality, a cold morality, 
which has no more warmth than the frigid conceptions 
from which it springs. Here is no opportunity for right- 
eousness, a sympathetic love of duty, but only for obedi- 
ence, a conformity to conditions, a classification of 
actions, paths, as safe or unsafe, and a patient, often a 
weary, traveling in the best of them. There is no profit 
in calling a tendency, God, unless we mean to hoodwink 
the reason, and introduce by a subtile personification 
ideas we have just rejected. It seems to us scarcely less 
than this to do as Arnold proceeds to do. " The indication 
on this moral side of that tendency, not of our making, by 
which things fulfill the law of their being, we do very much 
mean to denote, and to sum up, when we speak of the will 
of God, pleasing God, serving God." * This is to resolve 
religion, and that too under the plea of giving it a basis 
that can be verified, into a poetic illusion. The new T 
warmth is only a figure of speech, the fanciful words of 
eager sympathy that we have applied to the inflexible, dead 
fact of law. We call the old new, the aged young, and 
then spring toward the image of our fancy with fresh pas- 
sion. Whatever the cultivated may make of such abstrac- 
tions as the " not-ourselves," the most difficult of all ab- 
stractions for the mind to grasp and steady itself by, — an 
abstraction giving to the emotions a footing not a particle 
better than that of " the ego and the non-ego," or the per- 
sonal and the impersonal, which comes to Arnold and to 
others with the taint of metaphysics — it is quite certain 
that the uncultivated will either make nothing at all of 
them, or transfer to them personal quality in some 
strangely crass, crude way. The patriarch and the 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 63. 






MIRACLES. 237 

prophet fed upon no such flashy food, nor will their seed 
to the end of time. 

Here enters the charge that religion is ever anthro- 
pomorphic, supported by the often used words of Goethe, 
'Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is.' Quite 
true, human reasoning will always be human reasoning, 
human ideas human ideas, but how much merit are we to 
attach to the discovery? The only question is, Whether 
we shall to best advantage look toward God through the 
medium of our own nature, or the still more restricted and 
opaque medium of the physical world ? Whether we shall 
approach God with the best we have, or with inferior 
ascriptions, or not at all ? A telescope of small power 
may disclose a star, one of greater power may yield a disk, 
but both leave the secrets of its being unexplored. Are we, 
therefore, to despise them, or to distrust the facts which 
they do give? Because the evidence they offer is not good 
beyond their limits, are we to reject it within those limits ? 
Personality, the nature of man as a means of intepretation, 
assigns to God personality. This is our instrument of 
highest power, this our best conception. We feel, then, 
both wise and safe in using it, even though it should yield 
only a flickering stream of light, or a disk barely discern- 
ible. Certainly if such a disk is disclosed, we are far 
enough off from the inference that its apparent dimensions 
are its actual size. 

We can not be denied, in dealing with the deep ques- 
tions of being, the syllabus which our own spiritual consti- 
tution provides us, and then be referred complacently to 
one every way more restricted. If God is more than man, 
proportionately to the difference between mind and matter, 
is he more than matter. The only logically sufficient way 
in which we can lose personality in God is to first lose it 
in ourselves. Our own constitution is the telescope given 



238 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

us wherewith to range the spiritual heavens. We might as 
well complain of the instruments of our observatories, that 
they give inadequate dimensions, telescopic magnitudes, 
not real ones, as of the ideas of the human mind, that 
they do not go beyond themselves ; that they leave much 
undisclosed in .the objects they present. This is not 
allowing that all knowledge is relative, and so confused 
within its own bounds by an unknown personal equation ; 
it is accepting the obvious fact that the knowledge of the 
infinite is not complete. The unknown does not react on 
the known so as to destroy it. If this were true, there 
could be no knowledge but complete knowledge. There 
is not the least proof that in an axiom, an intuition, there 
is a formal, personal, organic element vitiating the con- 
clusion. 

The unverifiable element in religion — unverifiable in a 
low, sensational way — is faith. I have confidence in a 
friend, my neighbor does not share it. His distrust may 
be invincible by the proof that I offer, for there is in that 
proof an emotional coloring, which exists for me and not 
for him. A belief in God's personal being and govern- 
ment involves a faith-element, a personal element, it 
carries an emotional force which is present to one and 
not to another. Yet when present it is a truly rational 
ground both of belief and action. Thus the confidence 
which unites friend to friend, which holds men together in 
society, is a valid force, sufficient for the great work it 
performs, a sound basis for the conclusions it gives rise 
to. Faith, a tendency to repose on virtue and personal 
power, a ready submission to the indications of integrity, 
enters Jargely into our belief in God. The intuitive 
philosophy is one of enlarged belief in spiritual powers. 
It lays emphasis on emotional phases, the sense of obliga- 
tion, the sense of beauty, the manifold spiritual affections ; 



1 



MIRACLES. 239 

and works them in as the rational warmth of its primitive 
intuitions in their diverse bearings. It easily accepts 
liberty, and finds no inclination to let it down to the 
standard of physical causation. It expands human 
powers, and is struck by their broad, their ethereal working, 
by the subtile connections they give rise to, and the 
coherence, the force of proof, that is to be found in the 
feelings which spring up and linger along the lines of 
thought, disclosing, like the mists that hover along the 
streams, their presence and direction. Such a philosophy, 
with large faith in it. large belief in the human soul, in 
personal power, passes from its highest point of earthly 
apprehension over to God, and bears with it a still larger 
trust, a deeper repose in personal quality. It gathers an 
invincible faith that the best thing shall be, that the high- 
est thing hastens to realize itself, that to the true thing 
belongs a certain verification in the earnest of good it 
contains, in the desire, the hope, that are in it. New 
results of this sort spring with full birth-power out of the 
affections and thoughts that beget them. They may not 
be verifiable off this plane of reason and rational senti- 
ment — below it they certainly are not verifiable. Yet man 
has a scanty manhood without them ; he is little more 
than a mechanism of weights and measures making esti- 
mates of physical forces. Every one of us, at times, obeys 
these better, these faith impulses in dealing man with man, 
in putting all things at risk on the impalpable support of 
a promise, tarrying perchance not even for this, but launch- 
ing out on the stormiest sea of passion at the beck of a 
sentiment. 

Religion offers wide discipline ; it is its business to 
offer the widest, and hence it does not overlook the noblest 
portion of our nature — that of trust, of loyalty to personal 
integrity and power in ourselves, in others, in God. There 



240 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

is an unverified element in religion, unverified by any suffi- 
cient induction of facts, — for the kingdom is before us, not 
around us and behind us — but not an irrational element. 
So is there in all fresh, noble devotedness of man to man. 
Its saying, fulfilling power, its power to make good its 
hopes, is largely in itself. " God is here really at bottom, 
a deeply moved way of saying conduct or righteousness."* 
But how are we to reach that deeply moved way of 
uttering that word, righteousness, save as we have faith in 
persons, faith in God. faith in the deep,,broad., high law of 
liberty and right, uniting in a righteousness that may rule 
in us and does rule above us ? We may begin at the top 
and deny a personal God ; we may begin at the bottom 
and deny the personality of liberty to man ; it matters 
not • a coherent, logical movement will give but one result. 
We shall have, when we have finished our work, our 
destruction called construction, the empty word-shells of 
spiritual thoughts, of a higher being, into which we can 
again put by no device of ours any adequate, living, con- 
quering power. Our unoccupied shells are on the beach, 
cast up forever. We must, therefore, whatever time- 
spirits may have their way, be faithful to ourselves, to our 
hopes, powers, potentialities. When we move forward, 
compassed about with personal powers which no inroads 
of scientific analysis have been able to scatter, no sensible 
tests to disprove, we have no difficulty either with the 
independent being of God, or with his intervention in 
nature under his own counsels. This is not confusion, but 
a higher order induced on a lower one. We have two 
lessons instead of one, and the second is by no means 
inferior to the first. The stability of science is not more 
to us than the flexibility of religion; the impersonal than 
the personal ; the law of the clod beneath our feet than 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 65. 






MIRACLES. 24I 

the law of the intellectual life that brings it into re- 
cognition. 

A second ground of distrust in miracles, referable to 
the empirical philosophy, is that so clearly developed by 
Hume. We admit the difficulty, if the philosophy is to 
stand; but, as we reject the philosophy, the difficulty 
disappears with it. If we know nothing but what expe- 
rience has taught us, and if our most certain principles are 
the inductions of our past observations, then the miracle, 
when it comes, will be, amid surrounding facts, in. a hope- 
less minority ; and, as a passing ripple, can only serve to 
perplex and embarrass our vision, to throw the images of 
the objects about us into a giddy dance of indistinctness 
and uncertainty. The best we could do, if ourselves wit- 
nesses of the miracle, would be to wait till the anomaly 
had passed by, till order again prevailed, and induction, 
our only intellectual locomotion, was once more open to 
us. As spectators of the strange event, we should only be 
able to say, that chaps and confusion had broken loose, 
either in our minds, our senses, or in the external world. 
Why should such a philosophy disturb faith ? This same 
philosophy of experience, flowing from the pen of this same 
philosopher, confesses itself wholly unable to refer any event 
to any cause, or to offer the slightest proof of the being of 
any object that has passed out of sight. In its conclusions 
it is equally just and conclusive, and refutes itself in them 
one and all by its utter inability to cover the ordinary facts 
of experience. The fiction of the imagination that my 
friend lives, when he is absent from me, subserves all the 
purposes of a fact, could not be increased in its power by 
any form of proof whatever ; so may it be, so far as this 
philosophy is concerned, with a miracle. If our only 
foundation for the best conclusions of our minds is either 
the tendency of the imagination to repeat the images of 
n 



242 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

experience, or the certainty which an action of mind 
acquires by repetition, then the proof of a miracle can not 
be less convincing, or less sound, than that for any other 
event, so long as it masters the fancy, or holds possession 
of the thoughts. Indeed this becomes the only question 
in evidence. Does it maintain its hold on the mind ? An 
inquiry into its validity otherwise than this becomes futile. 
This would seem true not merely under the phase of the 
empirical philosophy offered by Hume, but under that, as 
well, presented by Spencer. There is with him no proof 
of conviction but conviction ; and on this test of validity, 
the assertion of one mind is as good as the denial of 
another; in each case the judgment declares itself as a 
physical fact, and as such is verified and vindicated by its 
mere existence. 

Experience, which is another term for collated sensa- 
tions and their collated lingering images, can do nothing 
for any invisible fact, and he whose philosophy is a cosmic 
philosophy, one of experience., simply rules himself out of 
court, — or rules the court out of the world according to the 
balance of power between them — in the discussion of any 
spiritual truth. We would have the largest chanty for 
every phase of sincere belief and unbelief, indeed we are 
at a loss to understand how earnest thought should be 
included among the states and actions that call for charity ; 
but one thing is unbearable, unbearable in Arnold, unbear- 
able in an hundred others, unbearable because it is mali- 
cious and stupid, and that is the scornful setting aside any 
proof or any statement on an abstract question, that does 
not suit the writer, as metaphysical. We would like to have 
this word, metaphysical ', defined. If it be false philosophy 
or inconclusive reasoning or word-mongering, we decline 
to yield to our adversaries, or to any one class, a monopoly 
of censure ; or to accede to the implied claim of complete 



MIRACLES. 243 

and exclusive exemption. But if metaphysics be the dis- 
cussion and the use of abstract conceptions, if it turns on 
the open defence or tacit assumption of certain powers of 
mind which give an ultimate basis of belief, and render the 
limits and grounds of truth matters of interest, then no 
man ever writes on a philosophical theme or in a system- 
atizing, theoretical spirit, without declared or implied 
metaphysics. For one to accumulate page upon page of 
presentation, argumentative, systematic ; woven through 
and through with a philosophy, a superficial or a sufficient 
truth-conception, and then, close each discussicm with a 
contemptuous fling at diverse lines of thought as metaphys- 
ical, is intolerable, because it is stolidity made gritty with 
a sprinkling of ill-will. When we undertake to decide 
whether miracles can be proved, we must raise the ques- 
tion, What are the various kinds of proof? This question 
we can only answer by a sound philosophy. Such a phi- 
losophy, we believe, will allow the human reason to furnish 
the strongest proofs independently of experience, and to 
provide a rational anticipation, which, running before ex- 
perience, prepares the way for things perfectly new among 
its events, to wit, miracles. The idea of nature alone, prior 
to experience, excludes the miracle ; while the ideas of 
God and nature make way for the miracle. In either case 
there is an attitude in reference to proof which vigorously 
excludes or readily includes it. Either doctrine has its 
anticipations, its a priori preparations. 

The one astonishing thing about the argument of 
Hume is, that men have so blindly striven to resist it 
inside the system, the ideas, on which it rests ; that they 
have so given way to fundamental assumptions and still 
drawn back from their corollaries. Most unskillfully has 
the defence often been made. 

Second to a false philosophy as a ground of prejudice 



244 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

against miracles, we adduce a true science. No thought- 
ful man can think of disparaging science, can feel other- 
wise than heartily proud of its achievements, and devoutly 
thankful for the powerful aid it has furnished to hu- 
man progress, and to religious thought. Science is an 
auxiliary scarcely second to any that, in the passage of 
time, have united themselves to the on-going forces that 
are to conquer for man his physical, intellectual and spir- 
itual domain. We may also well remember that the de- 
structive, skeptical spirit of science, to be deprecated in 
some of its manifestations, is yet one of its best gifts, and 
has accomplished a work essential to the next steps of 
progress. Revolution must come, and its evils may be 
more fairly attributed to the rigid tyranny, the inflexible 
error, that necessitate it, than to the progressive forces it 
involves. Free thought, large, bold inquiry, owe much, 
very much, of their present power to science ■ and no 
province of action is ultimately to profit by them more 
completely than religion. The best sheaves will be har- 
vested home at this point. There were evils, evils in 
theory, in method, in spirit, in practice, pertaining to faith, 
which the scientific temper and that alone could correct; 
and we may well rejoice in the higher estimate of nature, 
the more reverent study of its laws, the more sober and 
wise effort to unite ourselves to it by obedience which now 
prevail. 

These facts, nevertheless, do not hide other facts, the 
facts that physical science covers but half the field of 
thought ; that its laws, its regulative ideas, are largely con- 
fined to itself; that they can not be carried over to human 
action without working great, irreparable mischief; that 
science started in a reactionary way, and has pursued a 
reactionary orbit, and that philosophy and science, instead 
of mutually quickening and restraining each other as sup- 



MIRACLES. 245 

plementary branches, have fallen into antagonism, have 
done each other what mischief they were able, have forced 
extreme positions, and vented a scorn quite alien to their 
true interests and true spirit. 

The idea of law, fixed, natural law, so fundamental in 
thought and controlling in action, has fallen to science. 
Rightly has science pushed it into the foreground, for it is 
the beginning and the end of its method, its axiom at one 
point and its conclusion at another, that with which it 
starts and into which, with enlarged application, it is ever 
returning. Vigorously has science driven back with it the 
easy beliefs, the verbal explanations, the credulities and 
the superstitions of life and religion, and put man afresh 
to the labor of inquiry and to a rational shaping of conduct 
and character under it. Captivated by its successes, it is 
not strange that science has mistaken a half for the whole, 
and striven to conquer for itself the fallow field of philoso- 
phy and of religion, in which it has seen so much to be 
cast out, so much to be included. When, however, it has 
struggled to carry the inflexible idea of physical law into 
the soul of man, into society, into religion, its benign mis- 
sion has ceased, and it has wrought quite in the teeth of 
its own constructive method, that of induction. As the 
scholastic philosophy was compelled to give way to a new 
organum because it carried its admirably constructed logic 
entirely beyond its true province, and thought to reach 
exact results by manipulating the slippery, inadequate 
signs of things, rather than by inquiring into the things 
themselves ; so in turn does this very method of induction 
make itself obnoxious by carrying over to mind, with the 
momentum it has acquired in physical investigations, its 
own idea of causation, and by subjecting to it these new 
phenomena, restive as they are under an alien law. Science 
thus forgets to bring to philosophy the truly scientific 



246 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

method, and to ground the laws and principles of mind on 
a patient, unprejudiced inquiry into the facts of mind, 
under their due forms. By this means science has given 
rise to the deepest, most stubborn conviction against mir- 
acles. It knows nothing of liberty, and can make nothing 
of it • it never finds it in its own physical field, and so 
assures itself that it does well not to believe in it. But 
miracles are the concomitants of free personal power, and 
must disappear with it. Thus they give ground, wherever 
the purely scientific spirit prevails. In such esteem is this 
spirit held, that this last confession would be thought suffi- 
cient by many to close the question against miracles. 
Science is made equivalent to all exact knowledge, and so 
is set to open and close the doors of the kingdom of rea- 
son ; whom it bids enter may enter, whom it rejects are 
rejected. There is one only remedy, philosophy, the peer 
of physical science. 

A third occasion for predilections adverse to miracles 
is found in certain conceptions of the character of God. 
These conceptions are those which arise indirectly under 
the influence of the philosophy and the science now crit- 
icised. Where a restriction of faith is not directly refera- 
ble to an undue extension of science, or to a superficial 
philosophy, it is indirectly referable to tendencies which 
these have established and maintained. Some are quick 
to say, It is unworthy of Infinite Wisdom to intervene to 
correct his work, to help it forward by after-thoughts to its 
goal. The miracle thus betrays weakness, not strength ; 
failure, not success. Undoubtedly if a wise being sets him- 
self to the task of reaching physical ends by a series of 
physical adaptations, then later intervention implies a 
want of adequate power. But the statement does not 
cover the case before us. For a spiritual being to propose 
spiritual ends of discipline, and to fit his action to the weak- 



MIRACLES. 247 

ness and cravings of those under training, are as certainly 
within the scope of his wisdom as any steadfast, physical 
work whatever. It is the feebleness of the faith of man, 
not the want of strength in God, that leads to the miracle. 
Intervention as intervention is what the human heart 
craves, and this is what the miracle grants it. It is a con- 
cession of grace, an accommodation to the yearnings of a 
finite, spiritual nature, a help to that nature as it strives 
to fasten itself on its true object. 

Moreover, is it not a more fitting conception of an 
Omnipresent Being, that his work is a perpetual unfold- 
ing ; that it momentarily receives law from his life, strength 
from his power, than that such a Being casts off creation 
at one set time as a burden upon secondary, physical 
forces, and is so rid of it ? Was God closer to his work at 
the beginning than he is now ? Is it less flexible in his 
hand to-day than then ? Is a new relation to it imposed 
upon him by the progress of time ? What God may do 
and contemplate at one time he may contemplate and do 
at another. Hence if it was fitting for him at the begin- 
ning to arrange events in reference to a disclosure of him- 
self, it is also fitting that he should now do the same 
thing. But a disclosure now made is a miracle, God in 
his own nature is not so conditioned to time that he must 
work once for all ; if such a condition is made out, it must 
be made out from the wants of man, and these look in 
quite the opposite direction. A pervasive presence of God, 
which expresses itself in the universe of to-day, its imme- 
diate activities and thoughts, is as consonant with divine 
attributes as any conception open to us. Certainly the 
opposite one, which relegates God to the beginning, 
wheresoever that is, is not obligatory. But without it, the 
present objection to miracles fails. 

Yet another moral ground and better ground of objec- 



248 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

tion to the supernatural is found in the mischief which 
this element, so readily accepted, has wrought among 
men. Superstition, deadening to the intellect and the 
heart alike, leading to fearful perversions of action ; indo- 
lence, arrogance and cruelty united by a fiction of fellow- 
ship with providence, a complicity with the ruling spiritual 
powers ; ill-grounded hopes, bigotry, persecution, the 
entire brood of passions incident to a favoritism established 
with Heaven and crowned with miracle, go far to justify 
a settled aversion to the supernatural. Religion has usu- 
ally become pestiferous, mischievous, cruel according to 
the freedom with which it has involved the miraculous. 
The fetich, the charm, sorcery, witchcraft, spiritual influ- 
ence, all show how easily the unknown, becomes the 
malign, agent. Christianity is still infested at many points 
with the supernatural. Conversion is a miracle, sanctifi- 
cation a series of miracles rather than a well ordered life, 
progress in society waits inscrutably on the will of God, 
the kingdom of God turns on the putting forth of his 
strength, not ours, and men are gathered into it by an 
electing purpose acting more or less in oversight of char- 
acter and conduct. These statements are not merely 
made on the emotional side of belief, where they have a 
certain truth, but on the intellectual, logical side, where 
they breed hate, torpor and assumption, according to one's 
supposed relation to the miraculous agent. Emotionally 
we have no occasion to distinguish cautiously between our 
own willing and God's willing in us ; intellectually we have 
most urgent occasion, and to crowd back the miracle to 
its own narrow bounds of service. Beyond these it ener- 
vates the mind, makes it remiss, bigoted, and irresponsible 
to God at the very points at which his work has been cast 
upon us ; and this all under the appearance of reverence. 
Men have been so much disposed to shift the entire labor 



MIRACLES. 249 

of the world back on God, on special providences, special 
interventions, special periods, by means of the presence of 
a spiritual power that sets at naught natural law in its rela- 
tion to the human mind, that many conceive a strong dis- 
like for the miraculous, the revealed, as throughout dis- 
orderly, subversive, enervating. Lord Herbert, the father 
of English deism, had much of this feeling. We admit the 
justice of the sentiaient ; we only draw back from its 
sweeping application. The supernatural is capable of 
most easy, and has suffered most constant, perversion ; 
yet it remains at times most remedial. 

A single other occasion — though the philosophical, 
scientific, moral and historical objections unite so strongly 
to sustain each other as greatly to augment their force — 
of distrust in miracles arises from the insufficient proof 
which supports most of them. Such a presentation as 
that by Lecky leads the thoughtful mind to draw back, and 
to desire to disentangle itself from the entire web of cre- 
dulity and deception, of absurd and foolish assertion and 
proof, that perplexe the subject of miracles, with a sweep- 
ing and full denial of them all. 

Let the tendency of the human mind to ready belief in 
the supernatural, nay its insatiable craving for it, be 
clearly put ; let a few of the ten thousand instances in. 
which this belief has sprung up, adding prodigy to prodigy, 
and all for low, stupid, vicious ends, be adduced ; let the 
approach to the miracles of the New Testament be made 
by a circuitous path, each step marked by wonders, won- 
ders that have wasted the faith of men and debased their 
lives, wonders all the worse in their results because they 
could not be pronounced at once lying wonders, and before 
we reach the end of our journey in the great works of our 
Lord, we may lose the power to appreciate even these, 
and to bear back their mild light through all the dismal 



250 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

way of intellectual error and spiritual blight that has led 
up to them, and, alas, leads down from them. 

" The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning 
away from them — miracles. And for this reason ; it sees 
as its experience widens, how they arise. It sees that 
under certain circumstances, they always do arise ; and 
that they have not more solidity in one case than another. 
Under certain circumstances, wherever men are found, 
there is, as Shakespeare says : 

No natural exhalation in the sky, 
No scope of nature, no distempered day, 
No common wind, no customed event, 
But they will pluck away his natural cause, 
And call them meteors, prodigies and signs, 
Abortives, presages, and tongues of heaven."* 

The truth of these statements, and of many more like 
ones, none can deny; and they call out in some minds a 
strong predisposition against the supernatural everywhere. 
Spencer has very carefully put this accumulative argument 
against the supernatural, arising, first from the class of 
persons with whom the belief is prevalent, and, second, 
from its sure restriction and slow displacement by the 
growth of science. The unfavorable presumption is found 
in the nature of the facts themselves, anp 1 also in their 
relation to the progress of knowledge. By both are we 
strongly predisposed against the average miracle. 

We are prepared to present certain counter-probabil- 
ities which are overlooked by this objection to miracles, 
and which materially reduce its force ; and then to accept 
a certain remainder of well grounded sentiment which 
should render us strongly averse to miracles, and disposed 
to demand for them occasions and proofs quite peculiar. 
A miracle, like a revelation, is not an every day affair. 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 126. 



MIRACLES. 251 

The argument against miracles arising from their mis- 
chievous character, the avidity of man for them, and their 
very inadequate proof, is one whose value must be esti- 
mated on the supposition of a personal, moral Ruler of the 
world. If God is not, or is not a personal Being, then 
there are grounds to be taken against miracles far stronger 
than these, so much stronger that considerations of this 
degree of weight need not be brought forward. If the 
miracle is impossible, it does not remain in order to argue 
against it as improbable. If we are to estimate this im- 
probability, we must do it under the condition of a divine 
government, which at least renders miracles possible. 

There is, under this condition of a gracious Ruler, a 
strong presumption in favor of the supernatural to be 
drawn from the prevalent faith in it. Blind as this faith 
often is, it discloses an irrepressible religious nature in 
man, a constant consciousness of his own personal spirit- 
ual qualit} 7 , and an instinctive tendency to understand 
the visible world about him and the invisible world above 
him in part, at least, under the type of his own powers. 
That so universal, so deep-seated a tendency, one so 
rooted in human nature, should have no remainder of truth 
in it, should include no constitutional power of which it is 
the perverted growth, is difficult to believe ; under a 
reference of our constitution to a Divine Power, exceed- 
ingly difficult to believe. Arnold goes on instantly to say 
while pressing the proof above given, " Signs and won- 
ders men's minds will have, and they create them honestly 
and naturally." Yes, and these things prove a move- 
ment toward the spiritual, the invisible, the supernatural, 
normal to the human mind, and one, therefore, which 
stands correlated with a discipline, a counterpart of facts, 
which sustain and justify it. A persistent power shows 
something in the environment to call it forth. A vine may 



252 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

have grown prostrate for years in the meadow, may have 
wound itself about and tangled itself with the grass to no 
purpose of support, yet there remain in its nature, its 
hugging stalk and grasping tendrils, indications of a 
higher destiny, traces of another correlation. At least, 
in reference to our yearning, erring spiritual nature, so 
say our faith in God, and our belief in the coherence of 
his plans. Moreover, these miracles, false as ninety-nine- 
hundreths of them may be, and mischievous as from one 
point of view they may appear and are, have not, on the 
whole, been unserviceable, considering the state of society 
to which they have pertained. Better thus than worse. 
We ascribe to man the rudiments of a glorious spiritual 
nature, and look upon these manifestations as among the 
means by which it has been kept alive, and slowly pushed 
forward to its true development, the realization of its 
magnificent purpose. A spiritual mistake, a miscarriage 
in direction, a false miracle, are no more but of keeping 
with the present state of things, than a false theory, a mis- 
taken fact, a misleading method in science. The intellect 
we may say, thrives on error, or at least thrives in spite of 
it ; so can the spiritual affections, in the same qualified 
sense, thrive on falsehood, provided that falsehood is not 
absolute, lies in the way to truth, has such an affinity with 
it as to lead to it. The spirit no more than the mind 
suffers from delay, from effort often baffled and as often 
renewed. The wholly inexplicable thing in God's gov- 
ernment would be a delusion, a lie of this kind, with 
no germ of truth in it; an error pointing nowhere, and 
fruitful only of mischief. Does the human constitution 
embrace such tendencies, then man's powers, and that 
portion of them we are wont to think the highest, are not 
merely perverted and misapplied, but they are wholly and 
forever false. Extirpation not development becomes their 



MIRACLES. 253 

true law. Not till our swarming, bewildered thoughts 
are hived, are they of any worth. The quicker they leave 
the aerial region and settle down on facts the better. 

The spiritual history of the race for good and for evil, 
the great truths of its religious life, have all been evolved 
under this belief in the supernatural, under the perturba- 
tions and struggles it has brought to the human heart. 
The personal government of God certainly stands on quite 
another moral basis, if we regard this faith in the invisible, 
with all its errors and extravagances, as a normal, healthy 
element in the human soul, addressed from time to time 
by real manifestations, often coming to good when it seems 
farthest off from it, displacing death even when it can not 
confer life, than if we look upon it from beginning to end 
as a lie, a delusion, to be cut loose and cast out with such 
mutilations and losses as may befall the soul. A blow is 
struck by such a supposition at all faith in our constitu- 
tion, and in the methods of God, from which we can not 
easily rally. There is for us a presumption, an overpower- 
ing presumption, for true miracles to be found somewhere, 
drawn from this quickness, this universality, this blindness 
of belief among men concerning them. 

The presumption against miracles which arises from a 
false philosophy and a partial science, we must relegate 
to philosophy, and so pass at this point. If admitted at 
all, this presumption is of so absolute a character as to pre- 
judge the question, and render all critical estimates of the 
evidence for or against the miraculous narrative, impossi- 
ble. No matter what the proof, the presumption is 
stronger than it, being, as it were, the summation of all 
other proof. The first principles of reason are already 
involved against miracles. For Renan, with his convic- 
tions, to discuss the miracles of our Lord, was simply an 
exercise of ingenuity. The result was not an argument 



254 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

but a feat of exposition. Nothing depended on his suc- 
cess but his reputation for skill, his ability to do the task 
he had assigned himself. The facts are natural, how can 
the appearances be harmonized with this indubitable 
truth? This was the question he asked himself. This sort 
of presumption can be met, not by defending any given 
miracle, but only by overthrowing the philosophy on 
which it rests. 

Presumptions that do not strike so deep as to foreclose 
the question we may meet by counter-presumptions, and 
by historical proof. It is only to these milder objections 
that we now address ourselves. We make two admissions 
in presenting the positive considerations in favor of mir- 
acles ; first, that a steady presumption against miracles 
rightly accompanies historical and biblical criticism, a 
presumption with greater or less weight according to the 
character of the truths and the transactions that are dealt 
with, that is to say, a presumption always strong enough 
to force from us a sufficient reason. There is a general 
presumption in favor of a revelation, and in favor of its 
miraculous proof, but in the case of each declaration and 
event offered as meeting these conditions, there are uncer- 
tainty and difficulty, a special presumption calling for rig- 
orous proof. The divine must disclose itself, always does 
disclose itself, under conditions of obscuration and doubt, 
and it must, therefore, reveal itself with a decision and 
brilliancy sufficient to disperse them. The historical critic 
may well have a mind, then, predisposed to the natural, 
averse to accept the supernatural, save on the most fitting 
occasions, and under the most adequate evidence. Neither 
do we feel that because we admit the supernatural once, 
judgment has been hoodwinked, and we are henceforth to 
put no restraint upon the miraculous. This is the lan- 
guage of one who regards each miracle and all miracles as 



MIRACLES. 255 

irrational. For us there is no defeat of reason in the first 
miracle, and hence reason may go forward unabashed 
to question the second and the third to the end of the 
chapter. 

.A second concession is, that the supernatural should 
be left to its own freedom as to times-, places, parties ; and 
all alike be held to one principle, to wit, sufficient occa- 
sion and satisfactory proof. There should be no antece- 
dent decision in favor of the miracles of one time or dis- 
pensation or church as against those of another. Neither 
the Christian faith nor the early periods are to be conceded 
a presumption which puts them on a peculiar footing. The 
purpose of the miracle is, or at least may be, too broad for 
this ; and if we admit it at all, we should admit it on prin- 
ciples broad enough to apply anywhere. Great truths, 
spiritual movements, regenerative forces, rational condi- 
tions, sober proofs, these are the grounds on which and on 
which alone the miracle can be sustained. The feeling 
that excludes all intervention at one point, and admits it 
freely at another, smacks too strongly of partiality and 
assumption, of sectarian sentiment, not to reflect an addi- 
tional distrust on the entire topic. History must be left 
freely to make and define and confirm the conditions of 
the miracle. It is not a thing of private interpretation, a 
mine as opposed to thine. 

Under these conditions we believe the miracle to be 
most useful in the spiritual kingdom, and integral with it. 
The miracle, as we have seen, rests back for support on 
the personal being of God ; without this prior doctrine 
there is no opportunity for it. Personality yields the light 
which makes the miracle rational, and the miracle in 
turn brings the strongest confirmation to the personal ele- 
ment in our faith, is this element flashing up in brilliant 
activity. Religion, emotional, sympathetic, turns on the 



256 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Divine Fatherhood, and the core of this parental char- 
acter is counsel, guidance, revelation. Certainly no sac- 
rifice can be too great in confirming this conviction in the 
human soul. Nature, as a formal necessity only, can not 
be allowed to stand for an instant between God and the 
objects of his affection — to hide him from them. It is to a 
few a mystery why God reveals himself at all ; it is to more 
a mystery why he reveals himself so rarely. God once 
revealed, revealed in an adequate personal way, nature 
can resume her rule as the steadfast, beneficent expression 
of God's method; but till God is disclosed, nature is a 
cold, heartless, inflexible law. God must be seen in, 
through, above nature, before nature can become the 
medium of his wisdom. As essential as is personality to 
faith, to obedience, to love, to religion, so essential are the 
leading proofs of it given by revelation. Nature alone is 
too hard a problem for the fearful, distrustful, unbelieving 
heart and mind of man to be left alone with, and God 
intervenes, gently intervenes, to help him to his first solu- 
tion. The very discussions which science forces upon us 
show how easy it is for us to miscarry at this point, and 
lose the first principles of religion. If the breach made 
upon nature by the supernatural were far greater than it is, 
it would not be an expenditure disproportioned to the gain 
of holding in arrest the hard, impersonal reign of physical 
law. The scientist himself discloses the constant necessity 
of a reiterated assertion of the supernatural, before our 
spiritual life is wholly overridden by the natural. The 
miraculous manifestations are partial, preliminary, addi- 
tive ; as the thoughts of men take hold, as God is easily 
and freely found in all that he does, their occasions and 
reasons disappear. 

Allied to personality is the immediateness of God's 
presence in nature. The whole breadth of the physical 



MIRACLES. 257 

universe can not be put as an independent, self-sufficing 
mechanism between God and man without so estranging 
the two as well nigh to destroy spiritual sympathy and 
spiritual life. Such a chasm as this, as broad as creation, 
the conceptions and emotions of man can not steadily over- 
pass. It was needful, a need met by miracles, that God's 
presence in nature, his work by it and over it, should be 
laid open ; that the habit of thought which personifies 
nature, or builds it up in independent completeness, 
should be broken down, and give way before the omnipre- 
sence of the one only creative hand and heart. The 
miracle discloses this immediateness of God, the inflexi- 
ble law becomes flexible, the flow, of physical forces is 
arrested, and returns to its bed only when the Lord's host 
has passed by. A wholly new face is put upon the 
external world, and it becomes what, to the eye of faith, it 
should be, but can scarcely be, without some signal of the 
divine presence, the tabernacle of our God. The miracle 
to reach this end must be the true miracle, the real 
presence, not the deceptive appearance recognized under 
that name by Robertson. "A miracle is commonly denned 
to be a contravention of the laws of nature. More prop- 
erly speaking, it is only a higher operation of those same 
laws, in a form hitherto unseen. A miracle is perhaps no 
more a suspension or contradiction of the laws of nature 
than a hurricane or a thunder-storm."* We do not 
invoke the miracle simply to affix a new seal to nature's 
immutable rule, but to qualify the one science has 
already placed upon it. We wish no fresh illusion but a 
fact above facts. 

The miracle is present to bring confirmation of hopes, 
spiritual convictions, and help our staggering faith as it 
sways under the burden of unbelief, internal and external. 
* Robertson's Sermons, vol. I, p. 70. 



258 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

How often does the Christian mind find occasion, wearied 
with debate, its hold on invisible things fast slipping, 
thoughts and feelings sinking into mere words, an idle flow 
of syllables," the light and warmth of belief fading out of 
the intellectual sky, to fling itself unreservedly back for 
the rest of a day or a night on palpable, tangible things, 
on the life and history of our Lord ? The need of revela- 
tion, of the supernatural, is one to which the world's history, 
the experience of spiritual warriors, testify. This large, 
deep want confirms the fitness of the means by which it is 
met. How cold is the conviction of immortality which the 
best of the ancients, by their own strength, were able to 
set up, compared with that which falls to the simplest 
believer who walks in faith with a historic Christ. Is it 
irrational that such a faith should be provided for ? 

Revelation has also its new truths, and the appropriate 
seal of these is the miracle. The confirmation it yields to 
the old and the new truths of religion, passing on together 
in historic development, constitutes the immediate occasion 
for the supernatural, though, as a living, spiritual influence, 
its office is far broader than this of simple verification. 
The miracle is preeminently a concession to the emotions 
of men, and is fitted, if rightly present, to deepen, purify, 
enlarge the heart. This hold of the supernatural on the 
feelings has been the cause of its chief perversions, yet 
here none the less lies its leading power. It discloses the 
emotional nature of God, and stirs the heart of man with 
strange force toward him. As emotion, pure and strong, 
is after all the highest manifestation of rational life, we 
can have but little sympathy with that notion of dignity 
which would deny to the Divine Nature its means of dis- 
closure, and none with that inflexible, legal government 
which would fill up all the direct channels by which the 
life of Heaven descends upon the life of the world. We 



MIRACLES. 259 

cling fast to the miracle, not shamefacedly but devoutly, 
as the direct contact of Heaven and earth, of God and 
man; as permeated with the highest rationality, the most 
vigorous impulses of a purified, emboldened, aspiring, 
spiritual life, a life that steadily passes from the visible to 
the invisible, from the transient light of the miracle to the 
permanent light of the truth it has lighted up, from the 
special to the habitual presence of God. 

When the purpose subserved by the miracle is felt, 
its part in a rational system seen, the historic proof of it 
is in order, and has become quite possible. The truths 
announced, the events, the revelation that accompany a 
miracle, vouch for it in much the same way that it vouches 
for them. The Divine Word is to be disclosed by its entire 
character, certainly not less by its interior power than by 
its signs and incidents. The whole appearance determines 
the divine, and for its sure recognition wisdom of mind and 
heart is requisite. Wisdom is justified of her children. 
Statements, conditions, methods may be so preposterous 
as at once to destroy any claims they may set up of super- 
natural confirmation ; and truths, actions, revelations may 
be so weighty, earnest, immaculate as to carry over to the 
miracles that accompany them easy acceptance. It is 
discernment, wise, historical criticism, spiritual intuition, 
that instruct the eye of faith and reason where to search 
for the divine, and on what conditions to accept it. Under 
the cautious, yet open feeling we have striven to establish 
in behalf of the supernatural, a feeling that institutes for it 
a glad yet fearful search, it is to the strongest, most indis- 
putable points of revelation that the eye is at once directed. 
The method of unbelief is reversed. The credulities, mis- 
takes, deceptions of men are not drawn out at length ; 
nor the light of the spiritual world referred to only when 
its brightness has been dimmed by the vapor, the smoke 



260 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

and the darkness of a murky human atmosphere. The 
mind, with relative courage and hope, goes straight to the 
strong light of the New Testament, to the life of our Lord, 
and there settles the question of miracle or no miracle. It 
does not destroy the proof before it reaches it, but leaves 
to the best proof its own independent weight. Can all 
nebulae be resolved into stars? In answering this inquiry 
what matters it that many nebulae can be so resolved. 
The earnest inquirer, in spite of presumptions, still seeks 
for the instances which leave the point open, and when 
these nebulae yield in the spectrum the lines that establish 
a gaseous form, he accepts the proof in the face of theory 
and induction alike. 

The New Testament, and in the New Testament the 
life of our Lord, furnish the proper starting point for the 
historical proof of miracles. It can be settled by no 
amount of induction elsewhere. Such an induction can 
only suffice to make our scrutiny here more close. If 
miracles fail here they fail everywhere, if they fail every- 
where else they do not necessarily fail here. All else is 
open country, here only is the supernatural fortified and 
intrenched. 

The war is settled by the fortunes of war at this point. 
To one with a mind open to conviction, who has not fore- 
closed discussion by antecedent probabilities, this historic 
evidence must seem very strong; to us it seems quite 
complete. Sufficient of itself, as any historic critic will 
admit, to put ordinary events on the firmest basis, this 
proof is sustained by an internal fitness, completeness and 
harmony of relations and purposes, of words and actions, 
which offer it as a compact, self-sufficing whole. The 
narrative, in its events and in its truths, is organized 
through and through on the supernatural, and must stand 
with it or fall with it. There is here little or no opportu- 



MIRACLES. 26l 

nity for a sifting, refining, explanatory criticism. So true 
is this that nearly every exegete of that school rejects all 
theories not his own as extreme and untenable. Sepa- 
rately they are feeble ; collectively they are self-destructive. 

The natural and the supernatural are blended in the 
life and teachings of Christ in the most harmonious and 
vigorous way. Those who have been strenuous in reject- 
ing the one, though they have striven long and hard to 
retain uninjured the other, have met with very partial 
success. " Never were utterances concerning conduct and 
righteousness — Israel's master-concern, and the master- 
topic of the New Testament as well as the Old — which so 
carried with them an air of consummate truth and likeli- 
hood as Christ's did ; and never, therefore, were any utter- 
ances so irresistibly prepossessing." * 

But this proportion, soundness, wholesomeness, spirit- 
ual elevation, and germinant power, of the principles and 
precepts of Christ, make it impossible to detach them 
from the character and life of which they are the constitu- 
ents. That life and character are everywhere penetrated 
with the supernatural in so declared and unhesitating a 
form, that to deny its validity is to bring against them the 
charge of fanaticism and deception with its most destruc- 
tive force. The instructions of Christ are the character of 
Christ, and both are his seamless mantle j they must be 
taken as wholes or left as wholes. The natural and the 
supernatural are here so interwoven that they can not be 
torn apart without the loss of both. The soberness of the 
one element justifies the elevation of the other, and the 
glory of the divine rests fittingly on the comely strength 
of the human. 

Spiritual truths, holiness of character, powerful as they 
are, are to some attacks very open, under some blows are 

* Literature and Dogma, p. 94. 



262 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

as fragile as crystal. Integrity, insight, honesty, a sincerity 
that is of the intellect and the heart alike, must belong to 
them ; to miss these, in whole or in part, by direct charge 
or bare suspicion, is fatal. Who will yield the wisdom and 
purity and holiness of the words of Christ, and who can 
retain them and deny the soundness of that which so uni- 
formly underlie them, his belief in, use of, and claim to, 
the supernatural ? 

The success of those who, like Renan, have tested the 
powers of destructive, historical criticism on the Gospel 
narratives is not such as to lead us to expect much from a 
method so contradictory in its conclusions, one that sets 
up and plucks down with so free a hand its object of ven- 
eration. Scriptural criticism loses its prestige, its pre- 
sumptions of strength slip from it, its powers collapse, 
when it approaches the life of our Lord to dissect out its 
moral import, and leave behind its spiritual force. It 
makes a wreck where it would find a creation. The only 
way in which the narrative of the New Testament can be 
dealt with is to refuse to pick to pieces its miracles, one 
by one, "as an odious and repulsive task;" to accumulate 
against them in an indirect, remote way doubts, proba- 
bilities, philosophical impossibilities, till we have hidden 
them from our vision, and are able to pass them all by, 
negligent of specific difficulties and specific claims. This 
is the method of scientists, and in the degree in which it 
is less fair than that of historical criticism is it more safe 
and effective. We commend the earnest mind that has 
not settled adversely the question of miracles, on the lofty 
grounds of a priori truth, and laid out the possibilities of a 
creative method by its penetration into first principles, to 
the life of Christ, full of the soberest truth, and the pro- 
foundest insight ; an insight that never suffers his words 
to become conventional and common-place, a soberness 



MIRACLES. 263 

that allows him to announce no truth not then and there 
proximate to the visible wants of men ; yet a life, every 
impulse of which springs from the supernatural, not as 
a dogma, a power, but as a controlling spirit, an abiding 
spring of thought and feeling. Nor is this fact less 
impressive because the natural and the supernatural, the 
divine and the human, are left to the loving recollection 
of disciples to be perpetuated, and later to the evangelists 
to be collected and narrated as best they could. As in 
that life itself, so in the continuation and preservation of 
its influences, the same bold trust appears in the two ele- 
ments of religious activity. The natural is not stultified or 
set aside by the supernatural; the foundations are not 
shaken or removed because the superstructure is some- 
thing more than an ordinary product of art. Discrepan- 
cies, omissions, miracles whose precise historic light is 
lost or perverted, difficulties of one kind or another, in the 
free, unguarded way in which they are allowed to enter, 
show that we have to do with great forces, negligent of 
formal conditions, the precision and safeguards of weak- 
ness, and developing themselves by sufficient, internal 
strength. The kingdom of Christ is not one of guarded 
statements and petty precautions, exact coincidences, 
assertions carefully made out and minutely followed, but 
of bold, strong forces, natural and supernatural, playing 
freely into each other deeply planted in human history 
and the human heart, left to take their fortunes and con- 
quer by native vigor. The more guarded, the more 
coherent, the logic, the more continuous either in truth or 
in action, the more petty and powerless is it likely to be, 
the more of a formal and the less of a substantial element. 
The narratives of the evangelists are as sober, as sufficient 
unto themselves, as is the life they present, for they are 
for us that life. In these mirrors alone is the character of 



264 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Christ reflected, and distortion and perversion there would 
have been distortion and perversion here. Sound and 
sober were the minds and hearts that could give a wise 
life so wisely, a life that may struggle a little with its 
medium, but one that has for the most part harmonized 
and subdued it. The spirit that is in them was in Christ ; 
not otherwise can we understand its proportion and calm- 
ness. If they caught, as some are willing to believe, the 
supernatural as a false frenzy, a human hyperbole, from 
his life, and then added it thereto, how should they at the 
same time have kept close, evidently so close, to the fresh, 
earnest, searching principles he enunciated? If they suf- 
fered such intoxication from a wayward, credulous super- 
naturalism, how could they have given so quietly, and delin- 
eated so exactly the plain fact, and the precise truth? 
Christ is not one thing by reconstruction, and these nar- 
ratives another ; he lives for us in and by them. What 
they are in their essential unity and integrity, yet diversity 
and freedom, he is and must have been. There is for 
them no sufficient, constructive, harmonizing, restraining 
power save his life. Material distortion at one point 
would have subverted how quickly the proportion every- 
where. The interior, spiritual rendering which John gives 
could not come as expansion and interpretation to narra- 
tives unlike those of the other evangelists. The fact-ten- 
dency stands to the spiritualizing tendency in the ratio of 
three to one, and the former sets safe limits to the latter. 
We can do no otherwise than hold fast to the life of Christ, 
true to the natural, yet built up in the strength of the 
supernatural, a type of the human soul with the glory of 
its divine elements fully disclosed. We may suffer from 
minor misapprehensions ; the disciples may have put some 
limitation on this large soul, but we as they confess, Thou 
art the Christ, the son of God. For us to mistake at this 



MIRACLES. 265 

point would be to lose the largest light we have, and cast 
clear things, great things, into the shadow of things less 
clear and little things. The disciples, guided and guarded 
by these great principles, could go forward to that rich 
after-harvest of spiritual things, the Epistles, springing up 
from the same living seed ; we feel that if we can win any- 
thing, and hold anything, and live by anything, we shall 
do it as they did, at this point; and shall share with them 
that strange transformation by which they passed from the 
fishermen of Galilee to the disciples of Christ. That the 
disciples did not put back upon Christ their own notions 
and their own life, but caught them from him, is seen in 
the Epistles, as a harmonious development under the Gos- 
pels ; is seen in the creative vigor which wrought a new 
life in them. Those should indicate a wilder range of 
supernaturalism than these, if this element is simply a 
reflection of the narrow, superstitious minds that caught 
the divine light, and cast it back over the character of 
Christ. 

The subject of miracles is closely united with that of 
prayer. We might urge it as an additional confirmation 
of the miraculous, that prayer, as communion with God 
and the hope of gracious answers from him, must share its 
fate. The encouragements of the Word of God and the 
wants of men are such as to include physical events in the 
subjects of prayer. It would be very difficult to retain 
prayer as a means of reaching spiritual ends, and at the 
same time deny its efficiency over physical forces. We 
can hardly suppose that there are two methods of dealing 
with man, peculiar respectively to his physical and spirit- 
ual activities ; nor will it be found possible so to separate 
the two forms of action as to maintain over them diverse 
laws. The physical and the intellectual are so far in sym- 
pathy with each other, and in dependence on each other, 
20 



266 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

that one principle of intervention must apply to both. 
Matter has no more inherent strength and integrity than 
mind. The objects of prayer can not be met, if it is sys- 
tematically warned back from the confines of natural law, 
and relegated to a region of confusion, deceptively called 
moral. Nor are these the representations of Scripture. We 
are encouraged to commit our desires to God, no matter 
what their range, and to anticipate a blessing in. so doing. 
Faith is the first element of prayer ; we must put a bold 
face upon prayer or we shall lose it altogether. Timidity 
and distrust are not its constituents. 

Doubtless the point of change, the point which admits 
the sweep of new conditions, in prayer, is the mind of the 
petitioner, but this modification of conditions may strike 
out, we know not through how wide a circle of effects, 
spiritual and physical. God does not need to be persuaded 
to do good, nor is persuasion pertinent to his character. 
The change in the thoughts and feelings of him who offers 
prayer, the new attitude he thereby takes, do, however, 
give grounds for modified action on the part of God, and 
are another element to be recognized in his spiritual prov- 
idence, as much as is industry in what may be termed his 
natural providence. It is in keeping with the wisdom and 
grace of God that he should modify his action in recogni- 
tion of trust and love, quite as much so as that he should 
allow forethought and diligence to readjust physical forces. 
That would be a sorry spiritual universe in which cunning 
and quickness were rewarded, and trust and affection 
neglected. 

Though the new conditions secured by prayer are 
primarily subjective, yet these changes wrought in the 
heart of the petitioner would themselves have no sufficient 
reason were not the promise present to him of an external 
efficiency given to prayer by the government of God. The 



MIRACLES. 267 

sincerity and good faith of the prayer presuppose the sin- 
cerity and good faith of a giver, while the fulfillment fol- 
lows rationally upon the prayer as itself a spiritual condi- 
tion, a new term, in the problem of discipline and rule. 

With this view of the boldness and freedom of prayer, 
prayer that lays trustingly hold of the promise, " Ask and 
it shall be given you," it is absolutely essential to suppose, 
that answers of prayer may extend to the physical world, 
that the believing soul may shelter itself as freely in God 
as regards one class of events as another, that there is one 
common condition to all prayer, the power to receive, to 
assume the attitude under which the thing asked will be a 
blessing. Prayer, therefore, involves the same subordina- 
tion of physical law to the will of God, as is indicated in 
the miracle. The only difference that holds between them 
is that the miracle is a manifest intervention of God, 
while the answer to prayer lies between God and the indi- 
vidual, and is, in its highest form, a hidden intervention, 
that appeals to faith and not to sight. The miracle is 
reserved for a special purpose. An event already fore- 
closed by natural laws is, in reference to prayer, a definite 
expression of the divine will, has already been put beyond 
the province of prayer, private desire, and included within 
that of miracles, which, from their own nature, respond 
only to a general, a cogent exigency, a high-wrought 
spiritual activity. The answers of prayer come to nourish 
private faith, private devotion ; miracles to establish public 
faith and open revelation. In reference to both alike, we 
claim that they reach beyond the laws of nature, that they 
are not included in her on-going. The more frankly this 
claim is put, the more clearly the principle in the Divine 
government on which prayer proceeds is stated, the more 
quickly will the problem involved in this relation of the 
spiritual to the physical, of prayer to natural law, find its 



268 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

solution. Nothing is gained and much is lost by an effort 
to cover prayer by physical forces ; prayer, as a spiritual 
activity is suppressed, and obedience to fixed, external 
conditions takes its place. So the balance disappears 
between faith and action. 

Says Dr. Hopkins, " A miracle is no violation of any 
law of nature. It presupposes laws of nature, and is sim- 
ply an act performed directly by the will of God that 
transcends those laws. That the will of God should cause 
iron to rise and swim in the water is no more a violation 
of the law of gravitation than it is for me to raise this rod 
which goes up directly or indirectly by the superior force 
of will, acting at some point immediately upon matter. . . 
Such an event, so far as it is produced by an agency that 
is spiritual and free, is supernatural, but not miraculous. 
In a miracle the will of God acts directly, and produces 
outward effects with no intervening agency."* 

" The failure on the part of Professor Tyndall to appre- 
hend the question rightly, and still more his failure to find 
the distinction between the supernatural and the miracu- 
lous, sufficiently account for the difficulty he finds in con- 
necting prayer in any way with physical results. He 
could not admit a miracle, he ought not . . . The universal 
father can change phenomena in compliance with the 
prayers of men and without a miracle, quite as easily as 
man can."f 

The essential feature of a miracle is the intervention 
of a higher power in nature, the reaching of results not 
included in the complexus of physical forces. The 
mechanism of a miracle is hidden from us. We can not 
speak definitely of the addition of so much new force, nor 
of the removal or arrest or modification of so much old 

* Outline Study of Man, p. 289. 
\ Sermon on Prayer-gauge, p. 21. 



MIRACLES. 269 

force, nor with positiveness of this as unchanged, and sup- 
plemented with will-power. A miracle is not a phenomenon 
to be scrutinized and scientifically stated in its constit- 
uents. One thing only is necessary to it and vouched for 
by it, an overbearing power before which the laws and 
forces of nature give ground. Whether we speak of such 
an intervention as a transcending of natural law, an inter- 
ruption of it, or a violation of it, is immaterial ; we need 
simply to understand that the miracle lies beyond nature 
in her entire sum of existing resources, it is not included 
in her results. In what way her forces are touched and 
treated in the new spiritual juncture it is not necessary for 
us to define, nor can we know. To express the one fact 
of intervention, we may use a softer or harsher word, and 
term it as we will an addition, a suspension, a violation. 

The essential identity of an answer to prayer in the 
physical world and a miracle is more important. There 
is a formal distinction between the two in the part they 
play, and in the form of the manifestation • but their rela- 
tion to natural law is the same. There is intervention in 
the one as in the other, and this is the pith of the objection 
to both. Nor does any distinction between the supernat- 
ural and the miraculous enable us to bring an explanation 
to the answer to prayer not applicable to miracles, or 
remove the grounds of objection to either of them as a 
modification of physical forces. The distinction between 
power of will and physical force is most important, and 
does prepare the way for the recognition of miracles ; but 
it affords no complete illustration of method either in the 
miracle or in the answer to prayer, nor in any way distin- 
guishes between them. Whether we shall include volition 
under the natural or the supernatural, as a matter of ter- 
minology merely, is not very important. Either use has 
its advantages; for reasons given we prefer the former. 



270 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

If we include mind as well as matter in nature, we then 
have in nature two laws, one of necessity and one of liberty. 
The supernatural and the miraculous thus become one. 
If, however, we call volition supernatural, we then inclose 
in nature only physical causes, and have in the realm above 
nature two divisions, the supernatural and the miraculous. 
In this case, all action of God on nature, whether in 
response to prayer, or at the invocation of the prophet, is 
miraculous, not supernatural. The supernatural is defined 
by human volition, by the manner in which the will of man 
reaches physical forces. This is by the intervention of 
known, physical conditions, held in waiting for this very 
end. The reserved forces of nervous and muscular tissues 
are at man's disposal, and he acts upon nature through 
nature under known, uniform conditions. Thus his action, 
though incomprehensible in its last element, in its method 
of initiation, is by no means miraculous. A prayer for 
personal safety, is, in its answer, no more open to explan- 
ation under the conditions of volition than would be the 
miracle. The question in each case is, How are results 
not included in the ordinary progress of nature reached? 
If we say that volition affords a sufficient exposition, and 
that God's will may stand united to natural forces as does 
that of man, the solution would apply as well to the raising 
of the dead as to the arrest of disease, and applies to 
neither in such a way as to give any light to the method 
of procedure. There are no known natural means, no 
intervening agencies, by which the will of God is united to 
nature. The assumption of them is a difficulty equal to 
that of the miracle itself, and an action without them is 
wholly unallied to human volition. It is the absence of 
these that distinguish a miracle from an act of man, and 
just as much an answer to prayer. Nature is conceived 
as a definite make-up of forces, and that a personal will, 



MIBACLES. 271 

outside of it, should meddle with it, or be able to meddle 
with it, for one end or another, is the one perplexity; a 
perplexity that comes to the prayer of the weakest saint 
as much as to the strong word of Christ. In no case is 
the provision within nature, in both cases it is quite 
beyond it. 

Prayer is also, like the miracle, modified by the pro- 
gress of spiritual life. Prayer is thought, at the beginning, 
to be a constant, unobjectionable and available instrument 
for the working of external changes. Later it is seen to 
be, and to be becoming, more exclusively spiritual in its 
service. The excellence of nature is felt, and we ask 
oftenest the power to handle the conditions of our discipline 
wisely, and to wait patiently upon them. In other words, 
we come to rule the exterior by ruling the interior, finding 
the roots of power in our own souls. We better understand 
the methods of God, work more concurrently with them, 
and suffer them to work more uninterruptedly through us. 
We thus lay open our spiritual nature to the spiritual 
nature of God, and find nature more pliant and responsive 
under them both than we had thought it to be. Prayer is 
not thus less but more to us, even as God is more and in 
more than hitherto. Prayer maybe, under these advanced 
conditions, less aggressive and importunate at a single 
point, but it is far more pervasive and penetrative, and 
meets with a larger sense of acceptance. The natural and 
the supernatural flow in upon each other, and we need 
no longer to distinguish them, or to sustain the first by the 
second. 

In proportion, then, as the affections work with us as 
the highest products of our thoughts, as the spiritual over- 
tops the physical, and the personal completes the imper- 
sonal, will miracle and prayer find easy entrance in the 
universe. It will not seem to us irrational that mind should 



272 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

rule matter in the collective cosmos, any more than it is 
irrational for the intellect to rule the body in this cosmos, 
man ; nor irrational that the affections should break in 
upon the cold conditions of thought, and press them into 
a higher service. On these conditions alone does the 
universe become spiritual ; so only is it lifted for us to its 
real rank, and enclosed in its true destiny. 



CHAPTER X. 

Inspiration. 



THERE are few dogmas which disclose to the same 
degree the irrationality of the dogmatic spirit as 
that of verbal inspiration. Its proof is null ; it is a pure 
invention in the face of obvious facts. The advantages 
it sets out to gain it can not secure, for it lacks the bold- 
ness to sustain its first assertion by a second of the same 
nature, a divine transfer of the sacred books from scribe 
to scribe, from generation to generation, from speech to 
speech. Its first so great courage suddenly fails it before 
it reaches its goal. Its sole products are miserable mis- 
apprehension, unreason, and the elevation of blind hopes 
and servile fears to the position of religion. No doctrine 
could be more in contradiction of the general providence 
and government of God than this of final, exact, sufficient, 
verbal truth. None springs from a more complete misun- 
derstanding of rational life and religious sentiment, and 
none, therefore, could offer itself to our faith burdened with 
heavier presumptions against it. 

The moment, however, we pass from this position, 
there enter into the doctrine of inspiration great vagueness 



INSPIRATION. 273 

and variety of statement. There is a strong feeling that 
the authority which would attach to a specific, verbal mes- 
sage must in some way be retained, while the obvious 
absurdities of the belief are avoided. An inspiration that 
accords with man's nature, that is nothing more than its 
full, honest, elevated action on spiritual topics, that reposes 
on the normal powers of the mind, quickened by what may 
also be termed the normal influences of the truth and the 
Divine Spirit, does not satisfy this desire for immediate, 
explicit, final authority in the Scriptures. Inspiration is 
generally held to be more than this, to be a divine impulse 
so strong as to rule and overrule the mind it takes posses- 
sion of, and shape its thoughts to the uses of an alien 
personality, that of the Divine Spirit. This view may- 
receive various statements, but they all insist more or less 
emphatically on a result that is authoritative. 

" Christianity offers occasion for opposition by its 
inherent claims, independently of accidental causes. For 
it asserts authority over religious belief in virtue of being 
a supernatural communication from God, and claims the 
right to control human thought in virtue of possessing 
sacred books which are at once the record and instrument 
of this communication, written by men endowed with super- 
natural inspiration. . . . Each book is unique, a solitary 
miracle of its class in human history."* These are the 
assertions of men concerning the Scriptures, rather than 
the assertion of the Scriptures concerning themselves. 

The presumption here, as in miracles, is against the 
supernatural, is for the reality and sufficiency of the natural 
forces present, so far as these seem adequate to the 
results. No notion of the need of authority can be safely 
allowed to overbear the prima facie proof of the narratives 
themselves. We- would approach inspiration in the same 
* Critical History of Free Thought ; Farrar, p. I. 



274 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

spirit as that with which we approach miracles, prepared 
to accept any degree of it in the Scriptures which the 
particular facts disclose, and ready to dispense with it 
wholly as a supernatural agency when there is no sufficient 
indication of its presence. We would deal fairly with the 
natural and the supernatural, and that we may deal so 
with the natural, we must exclude the supernatural, till its 
presence is established. That is to say, the Scriptures 
prove the inspiration, not the inspiration the Scriptures. 
Inspiration is an interior not an exterior evidence ; the 
power of the truth itself, not the seal attached to the paper 
on which it is written. Full inspiration burdens the historic 
proof, yet leaves the truth exactly what it was without it. 
The truth is no more nor less than the truth because 
inspired, while the assertion of inspiration calls for an 
especially severe scrutiny of the historic evidence. Much, 
therefore, which we would readily accept as a simple state- 
ment or a plain narrative, stumbles us again if urged upon 
us as a divine message. We lose what we already had, the 
greater claim sweeping away the lighter concession. Mir- 
acle and inspiration rest on a little different ground ; inspi- 
ration is invoked solely to give authority to definite words, 
the miracle to establish character and reveal God. The 
one is much broader than the other. Inspiration that is a 
manifest breaking out and over of divine force here and 
there, is open to no other difficulties than those which fall 
to miracles, but an inspiration that is assumed merely to 
impart a divine authority to truths and facts apparently on 
a plane of human activity is a very different thing, and 
serves to burden our first historic proof far more than it 
can possibly benefit our later exposition. Truth must still, 
in all its highest forms, stand for itself and by itself, and 
work as itself in the human mind and heart. 

There would seem to be no more evidence of, or occa- 



INSPIRATION. 275 

sion for, a uniform, a supernatural inspiration in the Scrip- 
tures, than of a uniform, miraculous power in the detail of 
its historic facts. As these facts arise almost wholly under 
natural forces, and occupy the plane of nature, so, equally 
well, may the narratives that transmit them. There is no 
reason why the casket should be more precious than that 
which it contains, or why the spiritual experience of the 
writer should be more intense or complete than that which 
falls to him as prophet or apostle to utter. The words of 
Scripture seem to range from an ordinary apprehension of 
ordinary events through to the highest spiritual compre- 
hension and prophetic insight. This diversity, real in the 
events themselves, should be sympathetically transferred 
to the narration, and so it seems to be. No fixed method, 
no uniform force of inspiration correspond to these diver- 
sities, or can be expressed in them. Unimportant matter 
can not be transformed by a trick of emphasis. We accept 
the Scriptures under the habitual presumptions which 
accompany rational action, and may well accompany 
religious action, that each effect is to be referred to a suf- 
ficient cause, and to one no more than sufficient. The 
inspiration then varies with the person, the theme, the 
occasion, and is often expressed by the purely normal 
action of the human mind. We admit fully and freely the 
presumption against any needless departure from natural 
forces, and yet unite it with a ready faith in the supernat- 
ural, when its presence is disclosed in the product. This 
we make its evidence. We would gladly accept every 
divine illumination when its light is seen by us; but to be 
willing to call darkness light does not seem to us the need- 
ful preparation for a revelation. 

This view is not opposed to verbal inspiration merely, 
but to any statement of inspiration, which makes it a dis- 
tinct, divine force in all parts of Scripture, ne which can 



276 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

enable us to say, What the writers of the Bible assert God 
asserts, and these assertions one and all carry with them 
a divine authority. The Bible rests on its historic and 
ethical authority, its internal authority, and not on some 
invisible endorsement of Heaven between the lines. Any 
other view dishonors it rather than honors it, constrains 
and overawes us in our use of it instead of leaving us to 
live freely by it, and so puts it and us out of that open 
ministration on which we stand with the other works of 
God. 

The assertion that u inspiration extends equally to all 
parts of Scripture " and frees them one and all from error,* 
hardly seems consistent with the farther statement of Dr. 
Hodge, " That the nature of inspiration is to be learned 
from the Scriptures, from their didactic statements and 
from their phenomena. "f The actual facts or phenomena 
which the Scriptures present must be put side by side with 
its didactic statements, and the two expounded together. 
In doing this, we, at least, reach quite another conclusion 
than that of equal inspiration. The passages in the Bible 
that speak directly of inspiration are comparatively few, 
and employ language very general in its import. They 
call therefore for the exposition brought to them by the 
obvious range in facts of the Word of God, and by the 
many implications of method involved therein. 

There is a class of passages, represented by that found 
in Luke, 1st chap. 10th verse. " As he spake by the 
mouth of His holy prophets, which have been since the 
world began." The presence of God with his servants is 
here affirmed, but the mode and limitations are not 
defined ; they remain to be defined by history and by the 
manner in which the religious mind is wont to speak of 
divine control. This holiness of the prophets, of the 
* Systematic Theology, vol. i. p. 163. f Ibid, p. 153. 



INSPIRATION. 277 

inspired writers, did not prevent sin, why should it be sup- 
posed to have prevented error? Moreover, the religious 
mind has never been careful to distinguish between the 
natural and supernatural, but has rather signalized its 
reverence by the unreserved way in which it has ascribed 
all its activities to God. God is said to work in us to will 
and to do after his own pleasure ; and this with no special 
inspiration as its results. Much more than this, a con- 
cessive, reverential faith has led the sacred writers to refer 
directly to God what has merely lain in the line of his 
providence. "The Scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even 
for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might 
show my power in thee, and that my name might be 
declared throughout the earth."* This bold, popular 
method, which allows the predominant thought, the pre- 
dominant sentiment, to have its way without qualification, 
calls upon us, in exact analysis, to bring the assertions and 
the facts to which they pertain face to face, and understand 
the two in their mutual modifications. If Pharaoh, seeking 
his own ends on the level of a perverse nature, can be 
spoken of as pushed forward by the power of God, cer- 
tainly the prophet, the servant of God, doing the will of 
God, may be represented as inspired of God, even though 
wholly at work on the plane of his own faculties. 

A more definite statement is made in 2 Tim. iii. 16. 
" All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is prof- 
itable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruc- 
tion in righteousness." That the word inspiration is not 
itself able to carry the idea of an overpowering, divine 
influence would seem plain, since man's physical life is 
referred to an inbreathing of God; and also his under- 
standing. " The Lord God formed man of the dust of 
the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
* Rom. ix. 17. 



278 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

life " Gen. ii. 7. "The breath of the Almighty hath given 
me life " Job xxxiii. 4. " The inspiration of the Almighty 
giveth them understanding " Job xxxii. 8. In these cases 
the in-breathed spirit issues in normal activities ; this it 
may do equally well in the composition of Scripture. The 
skill of Bezaleel as a craftsman is ascribed to the fact, 
" that he was filled with the spirit of God." What power, 
therefore, inspiration in each case carries with it must be 
determined by the facts, by the results reached in life, 
skill, wisdom. Inspiration, in reference to the Scriptures, 
is farther defined by the words, " profitable for doctrine, 
for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." 
These guiding words are far better met by a variable than 
by an invariable inspiration, by one interwoven with the 
human element than by one rising to an inflexible line 
constantly above it, by one that incarnates the divine in 
the human than by one that floods the human with the 
divine. Reproof, correction, instruction imply all of them 
intellectual growth, spiritual discipline, cling close to nor- 
mal activity, accept the conditions, are not intelligible with- 
out the conditions, of freedom, inquiry and the errors 
incident to them. Scripture must cease to correct and 
instruct us, when we cease to misapprehend or to partially 
apprehend it. 

A strong, a chief reason why men will not go directly 
to the Scriptures, their many-colored facts of variable value, 
their great variety of instruction, for an interpretation of 
what is to be understood by inspiration is an antecedent 
conviction of what it ought to be, what it must be to sub- 
serve its purposes. It is a deductive, not an inductive 
spirit which rules them, one of assertion rather than of 
inquiry. Thus Dr. Hodge says, a The object or design of 
inspiration is to secure infallibility in teaching. " * When 
* Systematic Theology, vol. i, p. 155. 



INSPIRATION. 279 

we use a dangerous method, we should at least use it with, 
caution. We do not at all accept this necessity of author- 
ity, which lies between us and a frank appeal to the spir- 
itual complexion of the Bible itself, an inquiry into its 
obvious facts under their obvious features. The valley 
may be haunted, but we prefer to institute the inquiry on 
the ground itself; we are not to settle the question before 
we reach it. 

Authority, that is what is needed and must be obtained, 
with or without appearances. This need of authority ex- 
plicit and final, we must not only deny, but must regard it 
as the precise thing which has been and always will be 
?uinous. It is a requisition that springs neither from our 
intellectual nor our spiritual constitution ; is a want incident 
only to the dogmatic temper, and so to spiritual tyranny. 
Authority, clear, complete, immediace is destructive of 
thought, gives no play to sincerity of inquiry, and sets no 
store by that spiritual training which is the condition of 
all large and deep comprehension. Not those merely who 
do the will of God, but any one can know of the doctrine, 
since that doctrine has received explicit, sufficient, final 
statement. So certainly does growth depend on intellect- 
ual activity, that having introduced a precise and authori- 
tative element into the word of God, the same parties are 
compelled to practically lose it again, by insisting on 
investigation, honesty, effort to discover it. Authority 
is as much lost by truth that is not understood, as by truth 
not stated ; indeed, the things are inseparable. All that a 
dogmatic spirit gains, if it allows any difficulty in an in- 
stant, perfect apprehension of divine truth, is, that the 
inquiry it puts us on is one of verbal research into the 
Scriptures, not one of profound research with the sacred 
writers themselves into principles. In fruitfulness and 
enthusiasm there is no comparison between the two 



250 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

kinds of inquiry, while in authority they equal each the 
other. 

This view of the need of authority involves endless 
impossibilities and absurdities. The intellect thrives by in- 
quiry, free, bold, constant, — for this only is inquiry — while 
the growth of the spiritual affections is incident to the 
same effort, and carries it forward from one stage of pro- 
gress to another. The ability to understand divine truth is 
due largely to the interpretation of pure, varied, upright 
emotion ; the integrity of the emotion steadies, renews and 
enlarges the inquiry ; while the new truths elicited deepen 
and cleanse the emotion. Authority as authority cuts 
short the processes of growth in cutting short inquiry, or 
in predetermining its results. Authority, anywhere within 
the range of inquiry, is intellectual tyranny, is remanding 
the mind to conclusions not its own, to methods of inquiry 
and to issues which others have shaped for it, as against 
those which lie within its own resources. The leaders of 
the church, the fraraers of theological systems, are wont 
themselves to bring to bear the boldest criticism, criticism 
often full of personal tincture and bias, or what is far worse, 
assertion unsustained by criticism ; for them, then, to 
deny a like freedom to their disciples is spiritual usurpa- 
tion, is for them to think, and by virtue of their thought to 
refuse thought to others. As no inspiration, no authority 
can be so simple as not to call for an adminstration, the 
assertion of that authority becomes the support of that 
administration, and the point of fixation settles at once 
from the divine to the human level. 

What we really need are fruitful directions of research, 
changing, expanding truths, the acquisitions and the dis- 
cipline of inquiry, the intellectual and spiritual rewards of 
religious industry. Fixed truths, explicit truths, are no 
truths, or the most restricted truths, the most dead truths; 



INSPIRATION. 28] 

and to transform our beliefs and faiths into these is to 
first famish, and then extinguish, the life to which they 
minister. We want instruction not authority, guidance 
and impulse not arrest, truth as the product of our own 
minds, as addressed to those minds, not verbal statements. 
But if we did require authority, infallible instruction, 
we could not, under the present constitution of the human 
mind, secure it. The notion of its possibility comes from 
a false view of religious truth, of language, and of our 
powers of comprehension. There are primitive, mathe- 
matical ideas like those of a line, an angle, a surface, 
which are definite, unchangeable, the same for all. These 
may be so lodged in language that minds competent to 
mathematical inquiry shall fully and exactly entertain 
them. This very fact makes the rudiments of mathemat- 
ics spiritually the most unproductive of all branches of 
knowledge. When we reach the complex, expansive 
truths of religion no such process is possible. No prop- 
osition about God, the human soul, immortality, can be, 
in its direct and indirect bearings, one and the same thing 
for all minds, scarcely for any two minds. The single 
word, God, is one back of which any number of concep- 
tions, with as many degrees of adequacy and inadequacy, 
can be put, and are put. The exact coincidence of any 
two of these it is impossible to determine. The great diver- 
sity of most of them is perfectly obvious. The other 
terms of religion are more or less of the same nature, sin, 
holiness, atonement, sanctification, incarnation. These 
words are signs which stand for very different thoughts to 
different minds. The bugle-notes of various chiefs gather 
not, in their respective clans, a following more diverse in 
appearance and character, than do these catch-words of 
doctrine in different sects, uttered as the rallying cry of 
faith. It is impossible, wholly impossible, to put into Ian- 



282 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

guage an extended series of religious truths, — and the 
greater the scope of the truths the greater the failure — that 
shall mean the same, or essentially the same, thing for 
many persons of various powers, circumstances, and char- 
acters. Indeed the discrepancies of belief are largely 
these inevitable discrepancies of apprehension. For any 
to insist that certain propositions are authoritative and 
complete, the same for all, when they will not intrust 
them to those who accept them for restatement, lest the 
thought should slip in some way its enclosing formula ; 
when no two can discuss them without developing a differ- 
ence of apprehension, is to misunderstand the possibilities 
of knowledge, and, under the color of a verbal agreement, 
to play off upon themselves and upon others a gross 
deception as regards the unity of faith. There is and 
there can be no extended unity of faith among masses of 
men which is not a dead verbal unity ; to diverse intellects, 
diverse feelings, diverse experience, diverse culture, 
diverse .purity, common insight is impossible. Funda- 
mental principles involve this. To him that hath shall be 
given. If any man will do his will he shall know of the 
doctrine. Knowledge is not, then, given, but gained. 
Nor are the truths of our faith of so barren a character as 
to admit immediate, exhaustive statement. All the 
resources of mind and heart must be brought to their 
interpretation, and only as the spirit grows, will the truth 
grow that nourishes it. 

As authority in faith in any exact, extended sense is 
undesirable and impossible, so, as a matter of fact, the 
church has not possessed it. The Catholic church pre- 
sents the largest formal unity of any Christian organization, 
but so far as belief is concerned, it is to a great extent a 
perfectly dead unity, a unity without, of organization, and 
a unity within, of passive assent, only here and there sus- 



INSPIRATION. 283 

tained by anything which approaches personal insight and 
faith. Let there be life, individual life, and diversity and 
independence will disclose themselves at once. So true is 
this that the two propositions are convertible. Are those 
Protestant churches at one in doctrine which accept the 
Scriptures as equally inspired in every portion ? Far from 
it. They sacrifice a great deal for authority, but still miss 
in practice the authority they have saved in theory. Each 
sect rather has been made more violent against other sects, 
and broadened division by virtue of this very authority. 
Equal and complete inspiration leaves little room for 
honest error, and allows nothing to be regarded as unim- 
portant. Hence each must urge his own view as the 
divine word, and denunciation and recrimination easily 
follow. One is not at liberty to be charitable, if he 
is enforcing the explicit commands and statements of 
Heaven. 

Holland, above other lands, has been remarkable for 
Scriptural dogma and textual authority. Has it, there- 
fore, escaped heresy on the one side, or dead unity on the 
other? Both of these have fallen to it in full measure. 
"Nowhere was the proverb, Every heretic has his letter, 
so common and yet so true as in Holland."* Yet Hurst 
is ready to say, "Grant the rationalistic denial of inspira- 
tion — equal inspiration — and we have no solid ground for 
any portion of the Bible."t Is it possible that the only . 
alternative to the human mind is to believe everything 
or believe nothing, to be led or to run wild? Has it no 
faith in the injunctions, " Try the spirits whether they are of 
God." "Prove all things, hold fast that which, is good ? " 
Or are we to suppose that the Bible applies one law to the 
words of others, and another to its own words ? Obstinate, 
narrow heresies, irrational and pestiferous dogmas have 

* Hurst's History of Rationalism, p. 345. f Ibid, p. 202. 



254 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

again and again sprung up from some single passage of 
Scripture, literally rendered under a rigid idea of inspira- 
tion. The more inflexible is the interpretation, the more 
incurable and bitter the division it occasions. The early 
reformers found these influences, in many instances, so 
repellant as to overmaster the affiliating forces of com- 
mon interests, common dangers, common love. 

There are two movements in mind, a transient and 
lower one, a permanent and higher one. In the one, 
authority makes way for truth ; in the other, truth makes 
way for authority. The one belongs to the uncultivated 
and vicious mind, the other to the cultivated and virtuous 
one. Authority, evoked in support of the truth, obscures 
it as truth ; and brought to the aid of error is wholly per- 
nicious. Truth left to itself begets authority, a wholesome 
authority, more and more to be relied on. A partial, per- 
plexed method, normal only to the mind which will not 
act as mind, is, by the doctrine of equal inspiration, 
established as the controlling law in the Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

If we look closely at the constituents of Scripture, we 
shall see that an inspiration which crowds back the human 
element never yields any gains and at times inflicts great 
losses. A large portion of the Bible is historical. All the 
inspiration that is requisite for these simple narratives is 
knowledge and honesty. Any divine influence beyond 
these, must conform itself to this grade of quality which 
falls to an intelligent, upright man. To insist that the 
writers of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, should be 
accompanied, in every portion of the composition, by an 
essentially supernatural and completely controlling influ- 
ence, is to destroy all harmony between means and ends. 
Such effects as these can be reached, and are constantly 
reached, by no peculiar divine inflatus. To send Lfie 



INSPIRATION. 285 

Divine Spirit on a service wholly within the scope of the 
human spirit is to degrade it, not to elevate it. An inspi- 
ration of this kind demands for its completion constant 
intervention in the transmission of the Word ; as it is 
restrained by no reserve in reference to natural agents, and 
loses its own work if it abandons it thus early. There are 
two things of interest in histories of remote periods, the 
authenticity of the works, the knowledge and intelligence 
of the writers. These points are equally involved in the 
value of the productions, and to set aside the one by divine 
intervention, and remand the other to the liabilities of 
natural forces is to do things by halves, is to pursue an 
unequal and indefensible method. The same feeling that 
deters us from asserting an overruling divine force in 
transcription, transfer, translation and canonical compila- 
tion, should equally deter us from setting aside the nat- 
ural forces of the original composer. Why fling to one a 
rope over the face of a precipice, if it still hangs far from 
his reach ? W T hy a gratuitous assumption, when it is at 
the same time an incomplete one? If natural means are 
sufficient to transmit historic truth, they are sufficient, in 
the first instance, to frame it. 

A general providence, a concentration of natural forces, 
of spiritual and intellectual life, which avail in the one 
case, may equally avail in the other. To intrust one 
half of an inseparable, simple process to miraculous, and 
the remainder to natural, agencies, is to adopt a method 
incongruous and futile. These same considerations are 
in force, if we simply assert an inspiration that anticipates 
and prevents error. We are still only half-way to our goal, 
and the journey thus far has cost us dearly in the spirit of 
our exposition. 

A second, a large and most valuable, portion of the 
Scriptures, are the statements of religious truths and of 



286 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

spiritual impressions under them, truths and impressions 
which fall to purified, elevated thought, to quickened, 
spiritual affections. The truth-vision and the emotion 
alike belong to a high spiritual plane, are the out-break 
of a life that is coming to move freely in an upper region. 
They presuppose the cardinal principles of religion, 
whether reached by inquiry or by revelation, and translate 
these into a glowing life. Many of the Psalms, portions 
scattered everywhere in the Old and the New Testament, 
preeminently some of the out-bursts of St. Paul are of this 
character. 

The value of these words of exalted insight is weak- 
ened, not increased, by supposing them to have been 
spoken under an exterior, or in any way alien, impulse. 
Their sincerity, their personality are their power. 

The passage opening with the words, " Who shall sep- 
arate us from the love of Christ ? " is of inestimable worth, 
primarily because it expresses the faith, courage, enthusi- 
asm of St. Paul. No influence whatever can enter to 
advantage between these words and the soul that uttered 
them. We draw near and listen that we may learn the 
transforming, vivifying love of God. To this height he 
was lifted, to this height we may ascend. We find the 
love of God in this outpouring of the heart of Paul more 
freely than we can find it in any other way. In the meas- 
ure in which these truly inspired words transcended the 
consciousness of St. Paul, were beyond him, are they first 
lost to him, and then lost to us. Let him stand on this 
eminence, and tell us of the rapt vision, and shortly we 
stand with him, and see what he sees. What we need is 
communion with God through other spirits, stronger than 
our own, and this we have in these utterances of Scripture, 
regarded simply as responses of the human heart under 
divine truth. Looked on any other wise, these passages 



INSPIRATION. 287 

of devotion lose their power ; as mere formulae of truth, 
they are inapt, cold, barren, missing that contact of life 
with life which can alone impart to them heat, spiritual 
substance. There is here no place for double meanings 
or double dealings. We wish to know whether David, 
Isaiah, Paul, were so lifted up by the truth, did so rejoice 
in the presence of God as they seem to have done. If 
these words express the normal results of the spiritual life, 
then they vibrate with emotion in their every syllable, they 
are the best realizations of the best things ; if they do not, 
then, in the precise degree in which an exterior inspiration 
wrought in them, have they and we fallen off from the 
Kingdom of Heaven. The depth and sincerity of these 
avowals are their first, their sole, value. They would so 
far lose their true character under a controlling inspiration 
as to be of doubtful morality, of questionable truthfulness, 
uttered otherwise than with immediate insight and sponta- 
neous feeling. This portion of Scripture includes not 
merely emotional utterances, but also the statements of 
principles, precepts, the inherent truths of religion and 
morality. These, spoken with perception and conviction, are 
quite other than if spoken without them. They certainly 
always imply, and ought to carry with them, this rational 
belief and interest on the part of the writer. Moreover, 
they are addressed to just such belief and discernment on 
our part, and we do little credit to evangelist and apostle 
if we suppose them to have had a less normal hold on the 
truth than we are to seek for ourselves. But if they had 
insight and conviction, why should not these be left to do 
their natural and desirable work ? 

A third and much smaller portion of Scripture remains, 
facts which lie necessarily beyond the range of human 
vision, facts which put the Bible in manifest and contin- 
uous connection with the supernatural. We have no desire 



255 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

to straiten the supernatural either in the facts recorded, 
or in the record itself. We admit it lovingly not grudg- 
ingly, and only wish to know it wisely. Yet one may be 
surprised, if he inquires, to see how small a portion of 
Scripture necessarily implies more than normal powers, or 
must rest for its force on their presence. It is only restricted 
facts, not principles, not the sweep of great truths, that 
call for this reference. No principle in exegesis would be 
more fruitful and healthful than this, to allow the natural, 
the ethical, the rational to have way freely, and to claim 
freely all that belongs to them. Many a perverse state- 
ment rests on no other ground than inspiration evoked 
expressly to narrow down language, and give it the 
impulse with which it is to override reason. The leading 
statements even of a future life are outlined in man's 
moral nature, and anything much beyond these is neither 
given, nor recognized as something proper to be given, in 
the Word of God. The support which the Scriptures 
receive from prophecy is very limited, and the moral 
office which it subserves in any precise form almost 
equally limited. In our own time we are more often com- 
pelled to call in the moral force of the Scriptures to sus- 
tain its prophecies, then we are found able to sustain its 
principles by its predictions. 

Yet prophecy, a future life, specific conditions of salva- 
tion, so far as they do imply a higher inspiration than that 
normal to the historically instructed and spiritually quick- 
ened mind, may be allowed freely to claim it, though 
found in connection with a general life and experience 
resting on a lower basis. This infusion of the natural by 
the supernatural, this lifting human action into its highest 
and most sufficient form by the transient vigor of the 
divine, is the characteristic feature in the history of God's 
kingdom, and may well be in that particular portion of it 



INSPIRATION. 289 

known as Revelation. As the miracle may cast light on 
events otherwise purely natural, so these higher expressions 
of an indwelling Spirit can at once maintain their own 
power, and lend that power to the more narrow facts, or 
more restricted range of truths, with which they are affili- 
ated. We may grant this the more readily, if we remember, 
that the principle, if, in one view, more narrow than the 
prophecy, is, in another, far broader than it ; that if it is 
sustained it also sustains ; that if pinnacles, here and there 
in the religious structure that ages have reared, glitter 
with a light reflected straight from heaven, it is none the 
less strong foundations and firm walls that hold these 
stars in their places. The divine in word and work, rest- 
ing everywhere on its two component facts, must be in 
each self-sufficient, upheld by combined internal and exter- 
nal conditions, by harmonized natural and supernatural 
forces. If we yield either, we lose both for the purposes 
of religion. If we abandon the supernatural we miss the 
spiritual power, if we surrender the natural in its full force, 
we let slip the material on which that power is to expend 
itself. 

The Scriptures have a very diverse value for us in 
their different parts. As a record of historical facts, facts 
that stand associated with the race and the development 
of God's spiritual kingdom, we seek for them sufficient 
proof. As containing truths, outlining the order of the 
moral universe, we wish to find in them an illumination, 
a revelation to the human heart and reason, able to justify 
and sustain them. So and so only can the truth of princi- 
ple work its results. It must be left with the mind to 
unfold itself in a living way, or it remains forever hid. 
Barren iteration, sharp authority only interfere with and 
repress this growth. As containing assertions of the 
divine presence or the divine government that transcend 



290 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

experience, we call, in the Scriptures, for a vivid, continuous 
disclosure of a divine element, something we can recognize 
as such, and make an object of rational faith. Authority 
beyond these conditions, or infallibility beyond them, is 
intellectually unattainable ; and asserted as a fact serves 
to weaken, overshadow and stultify our powers of mind 
and heart. 

We do seek after a coherent development of religious 
truth, one line of growth for the kingdom of God, an 
assured unfolding of grace, to which our inquiries may be 
directed, on which our faith may be fastened, into which 
our labors can be gathered. The historic interdependence 
of every portion of the Scriptures, their varying and 
enlarged discipline, their increasing revelation, their 
coherent and expanding system, a system of events and 
truths alike, give them by right their central position and 
value in the spiritual development of our race. There is 
no denial in this that the providence of God may include 
other messengers, other forms of training, other sporadic 
truths, other dispensations in the progress of the world 
besides those gathered into this regal line, but only the 
unwavering belief that in the Old and the New Testaments 
are gathered up the continued disclosures of truth, the 
growing discipline, the increasing light, the essential and 
successive steps, that mark the progress of the .Kingdom 
of Heaven along its primary line of development. Here is 
a history not of nations nor of races nor of branches of 
knowledge, but a history of central religious truths, 
enlarged by development and by revelation, subordinating 
to themselves under the providence of God, the lives of 
individuals, the life of a nation, and at length culminating 
in the coming of Christ, who combines all elements, 
spiritualizes all forces, discloses to the race the funda- 
mental conditions of salvation, and sends forth on their 



INSPIRATION. 29I 

mission those germin ant conceptions of holiness, righteous- 
ness, divine love. The Bible, as containing this history, 
as marking the stages of this Revelation, gives at once a 
new character to all who have stood in the line of trans- 
mission, who have in the least come into, or helped to 
reflect, the light that streams backward from the cross of 
Christ, or gathers in supreme radiance about it, or pours 
down upon us from it. It is not because Peter and John 
and Paul were in themselves different from other men, or 
were overshadowed by a power alien to them, that we 
study their words, but because they stood near the cross, 
were partakers in the events of that crowning, spiritual 
epoch, caught its spirit, laid hold of, and were laid hold of 
by, its natural and supernatural forces. These men are made 
by their periods even more than they help to make them, 
and these successive periods and these growing revelations 
of the Testaments are all in all to us as spiritual beings. 
Herein are held the religious history, the moral gains, the 
spiritual hopes of our race. By these living forms of truth 
we trace our growth backward to its sources, and in them 
we discover the laws and the powers that are to bear it 
forward to its consummation. The Bible does not need a 
uniform inspiration to seal its value to men, or give it 
authority with them. Its facts, known for what they are, 
aside from any miraculous record of them, interpenetrated 
throughout with living spiritual elements, the elements that 
have slowly fallen to us under God's discipline, have a 
hold on the earnest mind that can only be disturbed and 
weakened by an inspiration giving accentuation to the 
syllables of command, rather than clear utterance to the 
words of exposition. Inspiration that is equal, final, does 
this. We are to hear rather than inquire, accept rather 
than judge, tremble at the letter rather than quietly imbibe 



292 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the spirit, give an eye-shot to words rather than a pro- 
longed search into things. 

" But it is the peculiar fate of sacred writings, that the 
last thing elicited from them is their own real meaning. 
The very greatness of their authority puts the reader's 
faculties in a false attitude ; creates an eagerness — an 
inflexible intensity — that defeats its own end ; and, in par- 
ticular, gives undue ascendency to the uppermost want 
and feeling that may be craving satisfaction."* This 
overawing, paralyzing influence is greatly aggravated by a 
doctrine of complete inspiration. 

Not only do we find in the Scriptures that kind of 
value and that degree of authority which are requisite to 
give them organizing power ; they can also, having united 
men in Christian churches, unite them by unity of belief 
and feeling in one kingdom. Unity is desirable, but only 
that unity which is consistent with life and springs from 
life, a life among whose permanent conditions are diversity, 
change, growth, a life inconceivable without mobility and 
freedom. A unity of this sort is approached slowly, 
approached by inquiry, by charity, by coming to under- 
stand the changeableness of truth, its evanescent bounda- 
ries, its leading directions, the barrenness of its intellectual 
formulas, the fruitfulness of its emotional possessions. 

Lines of thought converge in the religious world, but 
they meet a great way off. Like beams of sunlight they 
may seem to come together when they do not. The 
illusion is a brilliant one, but none the less an illusion. 
The real unity of these living thoughts is the unity of the 
bars of light, that they seem to come and do come all 
from one source, and work as one set of forces and like 
blessed results. Unity, the only feasible and desirable 
unity, which can come to lovers of truth is that unity which 
* Studies of Christianity, p. 415. 



INSPIRATION. 293 

arises from the delight which each and all have in their 
own convictions, in light known to emanate from one 
source on one errand, yet felt to be the more beautiful and 
serviceable because dispersed and colored by every object 
it touches. This unity, authority, urgent and coercive, 
breaks up at once. Most are dislodged from their own 
pivot of thought, and, like a needle lifted from its bearings, 
they vibrate no more under the subtle, variable forces that 
range the universe; they hold fast where mechanical force 
has brought them to rest. Dead unities, formal agree- 
ments, have subserved a purpose in the world's history and 
may still subserve one, but are none the less baneful, when 
they stand in the way of those higher affiliations which give 
play to life, a religious life overpowering by the attractions 
of love the repulsions of thought, and generating by thought 
the warmth of renewed affections. An army can do what 
citizens can not do, but a soldier is a poor substitute for a 
citizen. 

There is, then, no such antecedent claim for an author- 
ity, spread evenly over every portion of God's word, as to 
prejudice our inquiry into the kind of inspiration that 
seems to be indicated by the facts themselves of Scripture. 
To the Scriptures, in their obvious features, we may turn 
in pushing the inquiry, What constitutes inspiration ? The 
apostle Paul seems to recognize spiritual insight, a large 
measure of inspiration, as a generic state shared by all 
believers, by all who yield to and pursue the revelation of 
the Spirit. " The natural man receiveth not the things of 
the Spirit of God ; for they are foolishness unto htm ; 
neither can he know them because they are spiritually dis- 
cerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he 
himself is judged of no man."* The largest discernment 
and liberty in the handling of spiritual truths are here 
* 1 Cor. ii. 14. 



294 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

referred to believers, to those taught of God, as their 
common birth-right. Truth, all truth is freely yielded to 
the judgment of the spiritual, as those who may judge but 
may not be judged, who are helped and shielded in their 
judgments. 

The obvious differences in value of various portions of 
the Scriptures can not easily be overlooked. The text 
ranges from the words of our Lord to the most barren 
chronicles of a single nation. To parts of the Bible it is 
difficult to assign any spiritual service, at least for our time. 
The registrations of Numbers, Chronicles, Nehemiah, the 
minute ceremonial of the Levitical law, may have a his- 
torical interest, but furnish for us no direct lessons, no 
truths pertinent to our experience. It is impossible to use 
them as ministering to devotion, purifying the heart, renew- 
ing the life. 

What is true of large collective portions of the Bible is 
true in a less degree of detached parts. The Proverbs 
range from high moral principles to the ordinary level of 
worldly sagacity. To attribute to these different passages 
anything like the same spiritual value is to sin against 
common sense, and to sin against common sense is to 
subvert the foundations of intelligence. To admit this 
diversity of character and value in portions of Scripture 
yet attribute them to one unfailing source of inspiration, 
working in all with equal authority, is to shift the error, not 
to reduce it. Under such a view we must shut our eyes 
stupidly, almost willfully, to the obvious qualities of truth, 
and its obvious references, ascribing things unequal and 
changeable to one equal and unchangeable source. A 
gross offence of this sort against ordinary perception and 
argumentation is no preparation for the disclosures of 
Revelation. 

The theory of an overshadowing inspiration throughout 



INSPIRATION. 295 

the Bible, in the face of these plain and extreme differences, 
leads to fantastic interpretation. Newman offers an illus- 
tration of this in his Irish Clergyman. This man, under a 
theoretical obligation to put to some broad and sufficient 
use every portion of Scripture, even the simple direction 
of Paul to Timothy: "The cloak I left at Troas bring 
with thee and the books, but especially the parchments," 
succeeds in this wise : "I should certainly have lost some- 
thing if these words had been omitted, for that is exactly 
the verse which alone saved me from selling my little 
library. No, every word, depend upon it, is from the 
Spirit, and is for eternal service."* It would be difficult 
to devise a kind of reasoning better fitted than this to pro- 
duce a frame of mind, a style of thinking, inconsequential, 
incoherent and fanatical. The slight coloring — and it is 
very slight — given the conclusion by the passage arises 
solely from the injunction as a natural injunction express- 
ing the interest of Paul in his books. In a like way, a 
predetermination to find in the Songs of Solomon a spirit- 
ual allegory unconsciously leads to an exegesis that sets 
reason and criticism at defiance. Intelligence and honesty, 
plain and stubborn, are the permanent preliminaries of 
religion, and anything in conflict with these, is, to the same 
degree, in conflict with religion. 

A second obvious variety in the power and purposes 
of the Scriptures, calling for a like freedom of rendering, 
is that found in such books as Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms. 
The value of these books depends chiefly on their correctly 
representing the subjective state of their writers and inter- 
locutors. Job furnishes the most unmistakable illustration 
of this type of Biblical composition. The book is in the 
highest degree interesting and instructive, if we regard it 
as presenting the struggle of diverse minds — a struggle 
* Phases of Faith, p. 19. 



296 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

characteristic of the race and time to which it belongs — 
for an exposition of the divine character and government, 
a struggle issuing on many sides in error and only partially 
correct, or at least partial, in its best conclusions. On a 
theory of complete inspiration, it is difficult to see how 
anything more than this can be reached, or how we shall 
be able to decide, in the words of Job and of his friends, 
what is and what is not confirmed by the Spirit. We 
necessarily interpret the whole poem pictorially and not 
didactically ; and to its pictorial force no controlling 
inspiration is requisite. So also Ecclesiastes is profitable 
for instruction and correction just in proportion as we 
escape the idea that each passage is a complete, categorical 
statement of religious truth, in proportion as we rise above 
them all, conceive the state and spirit of the author, and 
trace in the book the confused, contradictory, half-illumin- 
ated experience of one who, if not Solomon, like Solomon, 
had perverted without smothering his spiritual nature. 

In these and similar cases, the verity of the picture, its 
reality, its faithfulness, constitute its value. Portions of 
the spiritual experience, the hopes and the fears, the 
clearer and darker renderings, of minds distracted by 
cross-lights, are given us, and we are brought correspond- 
ingly near to the human heart, to the living processes that 
transpire there, and to God's providences in it and over it. 
This is what we must understands book like Job to be, 
before, we can profitably peruse it. We are left to com- 
pare its experiences with our experiences, the light that 
fell to its characters with that which comes to us, and in a 
comprehensive, penetrative way to take from it the instruc- 
tion and encouragement it has to give. No textual value 
can be safely attached to single assertions, till the force of 
the whole book, in its collective character, is settled. If 
we accept the above view, or a kindred view of the book 



INSPIRATION. 297 

of Job, then an overshadowing inspiration in the writer is 
an embarrassment, not a gain. There is nothing in the 
results to show it ; there is nothing in the object to require 
it. That object is a correct rendering of a section of 
human experiences, the result is that object successfully 
reached, apparently by natural resources. If we regard 
the product as a supernatural one, we gain nothing. The 
narrative is therefore no more exact, neither is its exact- 
ness better seen by us. We seek a faithful portraiture, 
and all that the fullest spirit of inspiration could give under 
these conditions would be a fac-simile, a verisimilitude. 
Why refer a photograph to a divine agent, when a sun- 
beam is present to trace it? This is to humble the super- 
natural, to waste the natural, and to separate us more and 
more completely from both. We grasp neither well with- 
out the other. 

If we regard the Scriptures as throughout the explicit 
work of the Holy Spirit, we shall be distressed by portions 
of them that seem incorrect, or in conflict with other por- 
tions, and be led either to accept that which disturbs our 
moral sense, or to wrest it from its obvious meaning. 
Christ, in bidding us to forgive the offender for seventy times 
seven offences, made the law of repentance and forgiveness, 
or rather indicated it to be, universal. We know of no 
sound religious philosophy that can harmonize this principle 
with the imprecatory Psalms. " Happy shall he be that 
taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." The 
attitude of vengeance and that of forgiveness are irrecon- 
cilable, neither are they combined as equivalent facts in 
punishment. Punishment carries with it the rebuke and 
the yearning love of righteousness, and so affiliates with 
forgiveness not vengeance. We can not be called on for 
the same steadfast adhesion to these words of the Psalmist 
in their spirit as to those of Christ. Human vengeance is 



290 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

not divine mercy, nor divine justice even. Perplexity and 
dishonesty are the natural results of such a conflict. We 
strive to believe things incompatible, or to make compati- 
ble things which are in obvious conflict; either effort is a 
wrench at our moral nature. That the sentiments of men 
should be imperfect, whose actions were still more imper- 
fect, is not surprising, nor does it lay upon us any heavier 
burden to discern the quality of these words, and guide 
our actions accordingly, than it does to separate the good 
and the evil mingled in those lives. Why should we 
demand instant, complete adhesion to what David says 
and not to what David does ? Can we be so sure that the 
inspiration that is with him in his life, yet at times fails 
him so fatally, never grows weak in his thoughts, or dims 
its light under his passions? Must we alloy the Psalms 
of praise and thanksgiving by the spirit of the one hundred 
and ninth Psalm as we accept them ? Are we to suppose 
the Holy Spirit saved David from error for our sakes, 
when it did not save him from error for his own sake? 
Frankness, a freedom in seeing what seems to be, have 
much of the same wholesome, moral force in dealing with 
our canonical books, that they do in dealing with our own 
personal claims. Infallibility, the claim of it and the 
belief in it, work mischief in anything that pertains to 
man. 

The apostles, while they were with Christ, again and 
again missed the spirit of his words. Shall we render it, by 
our view of inspiration, impossible that they should ever 
have done the same thing when separated from him ? 
Shall we deny ihat they caught but partially his teachings 
in reference to a second coming, and so were themselves 
led, and led others, to expect a more rapid development 
of the kingdom of God than the facts have shown ; and 
shall we do this for no other reason than that we may rest 



INSPIRATION. 299 

blindly on authority, and be excused from making our 
own inquiries, reaching our own conclusions, guiding our 
own actions ? We know not when or how in God's disci- 
pline thought, investigation, personal responsibility, were 
pronounced so dangerous. 

A third fact in the Scriptures themselves, bringing 
light to the question of a variable inspiration, one work- 
ing truly and faithfully with the natural forces it employs, 
are the obvious traces, and that too in the most central 
portions, of natural, constructive forces, of conditions that 
have told upon the form and substance of the books. It 
is sufficient to mention the Gospels as an illustration. 
Diligent and skillful and profitable criticism has been 
directed to the relation of the Gospels to each other, to 
different apostles, and to previously existing material. 
Investigations of this character, prosecuted often by our 
best Biblical scholars, whether directed to the Gospels, 
the Prophets or the Pentateuch, presuppose natural agencies 
which have told decisively on the final result, even to the 
determination of the facts that should be given. This 
criticism, this scholarship, this inquiry are in direct conflict 
with an inspiration that moves by a sufficient supernatural 
impulse toward its own independent ends. These traces 
of natural conditions must be regarded as either deceptive, 
or as indicating natural forces really at work in shaping 
the Biblical books ; but to the degree in which they fash- 
ioned the result, inspiration is set aside. Inspiration as a 
supernatural force leaves no traces, discloses no method 
of procedure, yields no history. God speaks and it is done. 
Geology was found in conflict with previous conceptions 
of creation for this very reason, it uncovered a record, it 
presented conditions, stages of growth, traces of natural 
forces, and so replaced the supernatural with the natu- 
ral. It was no answer to Geology to say that the 



300 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

world was created containing remains of former periods, 
that the miraculous disguised itself under the natural ; it 
is no more an answer to the argument now urged to affirm 
that the Gospels were dictated by the Holy Spirit in 
apparent, but not real submission to external conditions. 
God does not devise ostensible connections merely to mis- 
lead the human mind. His work is not less honest in 
Revelation than in nature. By this view we should miss 
not merely complete narratives, but moral integrity in the 
construction of incomplete ones. Every vestige, therefore, 
of natural forces, of the conditions of composition or com- 
pilation, which can be traced in the books of the Bible, is 
in conflict with the doctrine of a controlling inspiration, as 
much so as the history of the rocks with that of instant 
creation. The delusion and confusion that are sure to fol- 
low a refusal to deal fairly with sensible appearances, with 
primitive proofs, is well illustrated by the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation. As soon as men could disbelieve their 
senses, or reject the obvious inferences therefrom, they 
could believe anything, and could refute nothing and estab- 
lish nothing. 

A fourth and still more obvious fact in the Scriptures, 
looking to the same conclusion, is that personal variety of 
thought and style which belongs so strongly to many of the 
authors of the Bible. This fact is not fairly met in the 
easy statement, that the Holy Spirit accommodates itself 
to the instruments it uses. That so flippant an explana- 
tion should find so general acceptance serves to show how 
often we stultify ourselves on religious topics, how much 
we hold in abeyance our ordinary powers of investigation 
and judgment. The style of expression, mode of thought 
and cast of emotion, that belong to a man, are not a mere 
garment that can be stripped off and cast on another; 
they are as intimate to the inner life as the rind to the 



INSPIRATION. 30I 

fruit. The soul of man is not a bugle, that, by whomso- 
ever played, imparts its own quality, timbre, to the music. 
The form and substance of an intellectual life are insep- 
arable, as much so as the physical life from the body it 
develops. Personal peculiarities indicate personal powers 
in normal action, as clearly as any effects their fitting 
causes. We cannot step lightly in and say, that the Spirit 
uses the minds of Paul, John, James, as instruments to. 
play upon, and so accepts their natural forms and limita- 
tions. These forms and limitations are the unmistakable 
and inseparable mediums of the powers they express. 
Form of this kind has no existence without its appropriate 
spiritual substance, a substance as true to the form as 
the form to it. Form as the offspring of force contains 
and discloses its very nature; what can slip between 
them ? 

If we allow ourselves to be tempted to say, all things 
are possible with God, the irrational as the rational, the 
inconsequential as the consequential ; he can speak in one 
way or another as suits his purposes, we are met not 
merely with the difficulty ; that to speak in one way is to 
speak in that way, is to sink into that way, and to be ren- 
dered by that way, but also with a moral difficulty. If we 
have no compunctions in confounding the solid grounds 
of knowledge, in turning specific effects from their appro- 
priate causes, we ought certainly to have some hesitation 
in subverting morals. And is it not such a subversion to 
assume misleading appearances ; so to state the truth that 
it shall seem to have one origin and really have quite 
another? If God is to speak, why should he not, for 
moral reasons, speak in his own name ? If he is to use 
agents, why should he not use them as freely and com- 
pletely as he seems to use them ? To assume a close fit- 
ting garment of personal appearances, unfaithful to the 



3°2 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

facts it discloses, is duplicity. The words and actions of 
God must indicate the most scrupulous integrity, they 
must be what they seem to be. His revelations may to 
any degree transcend the thoughts of those who receive 
them, but they must meet those thoughts fairly, and lead 
them straight forward. A method that habitually and, as 
it were, with every variation of deception, announces itself 
ostensibly as one thing, yet in fact is quite another, can 
not lightly be attributed to God. Scriptures that have the 
constructive frame-work and coloring of natural causes all 
through them can not suffer a denial of this their first 
verity without a shock to that sense of truthfulness which it 
is a chief labor with them to inspire. Epistles, like those 
of Paul to Timothy, to Philemon, must express the feeling 
of the author, lie honestly, closely, singly about it. or they 
are nothing. To allow the mind to introduce in such con- 
nections as these a supernatural force, or to play it off 
upon words of purely personal affection, is to debauch the 
reasoning powers, and to make our perceptions obtuse and 
wayward : we come easily to affirm anything in the face of 
appearances, that is, in the face of proofs. 

But the Scriptures in some cases deal directly with the 
reasons of composition, they also in single instances indi- 
cate the degree of authority claimed by the author, and 
introduce us partially to the conferences which the apostles 
held with each other in establishing a basis of common 
action. Luke opens his gospel with a statement of the 
reasons which led him to undertake the work, and they are 
his natural advantages for its safe performance, advantages 
that would be superfluous on the ground of a controlling 
inspiration. We should either have two causes for the 
same effect, or the obvious and assigned cause displaced 
by a concealed, unverified efficiency. " Forasmuch as 
many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration 



INSPIRATION. 303 

of those things which are most surely believed among us, 
even as they delivered them unto us which from the begin- 
ning were eye-witnesses, and ministers of the word ; it 
seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding 
of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, 
most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the 
certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed." 
His reason in personal knowledge for writing the Acts is 
equally apparent. If now we allow these natural forces 
freely to enter, and still strive to put over them a superin- 
tending inspiration, protecting from all error, we have no 
way of verifying this fact of supervision, we cannot well 
tell what it involves, for the partial and the erroneous are 
lost in each other, and we make void our ordinary methods 
of inquiry and criticism. Our method lacks homogeneity, 
suspends the canons of criticism, is without sufficient proof, 
and in the end misses the certainty for which we estab- 
lished it. In Hebrews ii. 3, the manner of transmission is 
defined in both its elements, the natural and the super- 
natural. The last is made the miraculous intervention 
which from time to time signalizes and confirms the first; 
not a force which displaces it. 

" How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation ; 
which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and 
was confirmed unto us by them that heard him, God also 
bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and 
with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according 
to his own will." 

Paul, in one instance, expressly disclaims any authority 
beyond that of a personal opinion. " I speak this by per- 
mission, not of commandment." " But to the rest speak I, 
not the Lord." * Farther on, as his conviction increases, 
he says, " She is happier if she so abide, after my judg- 

* 1 Cor 7. 



304 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

merit ; and I think also that I have the Spirit of God." 
This would seem to indicate that inspiration with him was 
not a recognizable, psychological state, but the variable 
force of truth. In the following passages there is a strong 
incongruity in the tenor of the style with the theory of 
complete inspiration : " I say again, let no man think me 
a fool ; if otherwise, yet as a fool receive me, that I may 
boast myself a little. That which I speak, I speak not 
after the Lord, but as it were foolishly, in this confidence 
of boasting." " Seeing that many glory after the flesh I 
will glory also," " I speak foolishly," " I speak as a fool." * 
We would put no strain upon these words ; we merely 
insist that they indicate a most natural human movement 
of feeling, and are in spirit opposed to any other. 

It is certainly difficult to suppose that the writings of 
the apostles, called forth as they were with their spoken 
words for identical ends of influence, should be constructed 
by a higher law of inspiration than the accompanying verbal 
instruction. Yet are we prepared to give to their daily 
speech and actions an inspiration sufficient to preserve 
them from error? Barnabas and Paul, Paul and Peter, 
Paul and the apostles, were at times found in positive dis- 
agreement, or in animated discussion. Matters of interest 
in regard to the Jewish observances were referred to the 
body of the apostles, and settled by them with conference 
and "much disputing," — a disagreement that had already 
occasioned " no small dissension and disputation." f That 
this division of sentiment was but partially healed is evi- 
dent from the epistles of Paul. Paul, under the pressure 
of an adverse criticism, asserts strongly his independent, 
personal, equal power. " But of those who seemed to be 
somewhat, whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter 
to me : God accepteth no man's person : for they who 

*. 2 Cor. 11. f Acts 15. 



INSPIRATION. 305 

seemed to be somewhat, in conference added nothing to 
me." * 

When we recollect that this divided opinion arose 
between the apostles themselves, in reference to religious 
action of a most weighty character, and was only softened 
by warm discussion and protracted conference, we see 
plainly that they were guided by human judgment, and 
not by a peremptory, controlling, divine Spirit. A lack of 
entire coincidence in apprehension between Peter and 
Paul seems also implied in 11 Pe. iii, 16. " As also in all 
his epistles, speaking in them of these things ; in which 
are some things hard to be understood, which they that 
are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the 
other scriptures, unto their own destruction." In the love 
which Peter expresses for Paul, we see that form of unity 
secured which is incident to earnest and disinterested men. 
There is not a supernatural, identical power at work 
within, but strong spiritual convictions rather, struggling 
with the discrepancies which fall to human minds, and 
human hearts. It is the plane of daily life on which 
these events are transpiring. If our Lord ascribes the 
words of David to the Holy Ghost, f he refers also those 
of his disciples to the same source ; t we ought therefore 
to interpret the one passage as the other by the facts which 
correspond to it. If a general indwelling spirit of truth is 
sufficient to cover the one assertion, it may be also to cover 
the other. We have no right to a stringency of meaning 
when inspiration is involved, which is not in harmony with 
the usual language of the Bible. 

There are instances in which errors of action and 
belief, widely present in the world's history, and very 
mischievous too, seem to find, and have been thought to 
find, color in the Bible. One of these is the speedy second 

* Gal. ii, 6. f Mark xii,. 36. % Mark xiii, II. 



306 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

coming of Christ. This belief, in one form or another, has 
traveled down with the church for many centuries, refusing 
the correction of experience. " But this I say, brethren, 
the time is short."* "But the end of all things is at 
hand."f 

Another error pernicious in itself and associated with 
a whole family of pestiferous follies has been that of celi- 
bacy. " These are they which were not defiled with women ; 
for they are virgins. "$ A third misconception or partial 
conception, still thrusting itself in the way of progress, 
arises from a too general and rigorous rendering of the 
instructions of Paul, of his estimate of women, their powers, 
positions, duties. If we overlook the restrictions which 
fall to times and persons, it is impossible to avoid the evils 
which follow these portions of Scripture. Inwrought error 
and precipitate tendencies in the human mind will cer- 
tainly develop themselves in spite of exegesis, but under 
wiser interpretation they will not be able to drag the Bible 
into their service by the force of single texts, against its 
general spirit. If every word is a hook of steel it is difficult 
to escape such results. 

A view of inspiration which allows it to unite in a free, 
variable way to the exceedingly diverse facts of Scripture ; 
to pass from the purely natural basis on which the thoughts 
and words of a good man are ordered, through more pro- 
found spiritual convictions, up to sudden insight and pro- 
phetic vision ; which admits its presence alike in the nat- 
ural and in the supernatural according to the face which 
the facts themselves present, has this great advantage, 
that the Scriptures are brought nearer to our daily life, and 
their alleged errors and contradictions sink to their lowest 
value and inflict least injury on our faith. Every portion 
of the Bible retains its own independent strength, and to 
* i Cor. vii. 29. f 1 Pet. iv. 7. £ Rev. xiv.. 4. 



INSPIRATION. 307 

this adds that which falls to other portions. A failure at 
one point, real or apparent, whether attached to the orig- 
inal text or to its transmission, leaves other points unweak- 
ened. On the other hand, if we attribute to the Scriptures 
an inspiration supernatural throughout, pledged to every 
portion alike, we reduce the strength of the whole to the 
strength of the weakest part. Any error, any deficiency, 
any conflict, is at once serious. If the defences are par- 
tially broken down, the invading host enters. The one 
method puts the strength of the Scriptures at its maximum, 
at that of its strongest positions, in their additive, coopera- 
tive attitude ; the other puts that strength at its minimum, 
at the defensibility of the most assailable out-work. Thus 
it has happened that the new truths of astronomy and 
geology have been thought, each in turn, to militate with 
Revelation, and have brought much disturbance to its dis- 
ciples. Under a better view of inspiration they would 
have been wholly harmless. Any new interpretation when 
first offered may thus bear a hostile attitude ; and any 
jostling of faith creates a species of panic. The alarmed 
bees of orthodoxy, at the mere approach of a stranger, 
swarm out to defend the hive. Discussion, change, progress 
are made difficult and perilous, unnecessarily so. Nothing 
is unimportant, nothing secondary, since a single flaw in 
the fragile, crystalline faith endangers, like a seam in a 
vase, its entire value. The rational defender of his belief 
can advance and recede, give and take ground, with bold- 
ness, understanding that the gains of the contest are not 
settled by holding or losing a particular territory. Even 
the difficulties and discrepancies of the Bible serve with 
him a purpose, for they show the natural, undesigned way 
in which it has arisen, they disclose it as a true historical 
product, falling to divided periods and scattered agents, 
and so they enable him to lay the more emphasis on its 



3©8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

inherent unity, the order and growth of its truths. They 
help to exclude the most dangerous and obtrusive supposi- 
tion, that of deception. 

A corresponding, personal, subjective advantage belongs 
to the more flexible theory of inspiration. If any assertion 
or action disturbs our moral sense, it is not laid upon us 
by divine authority; our feet are not instantly caught by it 
as by a snare; we are not compelled to suppress our best 
sentiments as if they too were a temptation and an error. 
We have time to wait, boldness to inquire, freedom to 
accept or reject explanation, room in which to institute a 
rational movement. We are not alarmed, as at sacrilege, 
when the accustomed rendering or familiar application of 
a passage is rejected ; our thoughts are at ease, and may 
honestly, diligently, fearlessly pursue the labors offered to 
them. Investigation, modification are in order, and that 
too on the ordinary condition of candor and intelligence. 
There are corresponding losses under authority with no 
compensatory gains. The most beneficent portions of 
God's word owe very little to external proof. Their 
strength is in them, and only as we perceive this intrinsic 
strength of the truth can it greatly bless us. A command, 
no matter how righteous, that rests on a force foreign to 
the mind and heart of him who receives it, thereby loses 
its chief power to bless; and an interpretation that keeps 
the element of authority always uppermost, thereby con- 
ceals the most serviceable features of truth, its intrinsic 
rationality and fitness. Authority has only a very partial 
and transient service, and to put it foremost and make it 
permanent is to check growth, and establish in the highest 
domain a perpetual vassalage. A method that evokes 
inquiry, demands honesty, quickens thought and renews 
each instant the sense of responsibility, is in the line of 
our powers, and so in the line of God's discipline. 



INSPIRATION. 309 

A belief in an instant, equal inspiration, or in any 
proximate doctrine, nourishes a seductive, deceptive dog- 
matism, which we can not too much dread as the enemy 
of peace and truth. There is sure to be some man, or 
body of men, who will assume the liberty of inquiry and 
theory, while denying it to others. It will be true of the 
Biblicist, that, with a subtile deception of himself and 
others, '* he only wishes men to submit their understanding 
to God, that is to the Bible, that is to his interpretation " 
of it. The earnestness and blindness with which this is 
done make it none the less fatal to personal liberty and 
growth. What men have accepted, and are very largely 
accepting, under the authority of inspiration is the light 
of truth passed through the lenses of one or more minds, 
and casting its facts, in their dimensions, groupings and 
coloring, on some newly adjusted screen, which, with its 
carefully arranged images, is to remain an eternal syllabus 
of statement, that which vision may never again transcend. 
This modification of truth by the mind that presents it, is 
unavoidable, and without mischief, if it is well understood, 
and no one product is made the precise equivalent of 
divine truth. 

We feel the more bold in using the Bible in a living 
way for our immediate intellectual and spiritual ends by 
observing the methods in which the disciples of Christ 
and Christ himself employed it. The apostles quote the 
Old Testament negligently, using one or another version 
at pleasure, deal hastily with the passages referred to it, 
and even, as in Jude, make a citation from a spurious 
book, that of Enoch. Indeed the freedom of the writers 
of the New Testament in quotation has been a stumbling- 
block, going so far as to lift the passages cited quite from 
their original purpose. We need not enter upon this point. 
1 1 is sufficient for our argument that there is here a strong, 



3IO A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

free hand, making such uses of the Bible as were present 
to the thoughts of the writer, with no scrupulous exegesis. 
What an unmistakable tinge is there of the purpose of the 
evangelist, of the immediate point pressing upon his mind, 
when he says, these things were done " that it might be 
fulfilled." The order of procedure is inverted under the 
headstrong argument. The prophecy is made to determine 
the events, not the events the prophecy. It matters little ; 
the proof is the same, and the emotion greater. 

The freedom of our Saviour in dealing with the Old 
Testament is more observable, as it proceeds on a much 
higher plane. The declaration with which he puts forth 
his own rendering of truth is the emphatic one of contrast ; 
Ye have heard that it hath been said, but I say unto you. 
This introduction to his precepts is not so much one of 
command as one by which he makes ready for the enlarge- 
ment of the truths before him, and to reissue them in a 
fresher, more living form. Thus he treats the institution 
of the Sabbath. There is no constraint thrown upon him 
by a previous divine message, no effort at reconciliation, — 
unless it be those words of his, explanatory of God's 
method, in which he refers the commands of Moses, per- 
taining to divorce, to a concession made to the Israelites 
because of the hardness of their hearts — but a represen- 
tation of the subject under deeper insight and existing 
issues. It may be thought that the example of the disci- 
ples and of Christ weighs not, since they themselves, as 
inspired, might deal in their own way with the Bible. The 
apostles referred to the Old Testament as an authority. 
They adduced it in support of their own statements. 
Their method of use does, therefore, show the kind and 
measure of faith they reposed in the Scriptures. Any 
inexactness, any departure from the letter or spirit of the 
passage quoted, any haste of interpretation, indicate a free 



INSPIRATION. 311 

and figurative rendering rather than that precise and ver- 
bal one, which is alone consistent with plenary inspiration. 
Our Saviour's manner of reference to the Old Testa- 
ment shows plainly that it had for him no permanent, 
binding force in the form of the message ; but that he 
regarded the time as present in which it was to be displaced, 
or rather replaced, with more searching spiritual princi- 
ples. If this is true of those leading injunctions and 
institutions with which he dealt, we are prepared to accept 
it as true of any or every portion of the Old Testament, 
whenever and wherever a profounder spirit is called for. 
If one inspired statement seeks enlargement, a fresh infu- 
sion of spiritual life, so may another. The truth of a 
changeable, progressive Revelation finds entrance, and 
we are left to follow it to its results. The view of previous 
generations is not, and was not intended to be, our view. 
We accept the fact that the truths of Revelation call for 
constant restatement, that they suffer from the men and 
races through which they are transmitted, and that vari- 
able, expanding life is a controlling feature in Christianity. 
But variability and expansion involve human elements, and 
only as human elements have found their way into the 
Scriptures. Even the words of Christ may have, must have, 
a changing force for changing minds and ages. We dis- 
cover in Christ's teachings no effort to formulate religious 
truths for all times, but rather an effort to break the formulae 
of the past, and to restore truth in his own time to freedom 
and life. He does not inquire exactly what they of old 
times must have meant, he puts instantly and easily out 
what he himself means, carrying home the new truths with 
the phrase, " I say unto you." The new wine has its own 
new bottle. So now may interpretation succeed interpreta- 
tion, provided always that truth is replaced by richer truth, 
insight by deeper insight, and each generation is made a 



312 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

larger heir of nature and Revelation. This is to allow the 
Gospel to bring forth first the blade, then the ear, after 
that the full corn in the ear : and, says our Saviour, " So is 
the Kingdom of God." 

" For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But 
when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in 
part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as 
a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child ; but 
when I became a man, I put away childish things. For 
now we see through a glass darkly ; but then face to face. 
Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I 
am known."* 



CHAPTER XI. 

Interpretation, 

DEFINING inspiration by the facts which the Scrip- 
tures themselves present, we find comparatively few 
reasons for the doctrine that an equal, supernatural inspi- 
ration — equal because supernatural — pervades all parts of 
them. We do not seem to find, nor should we expect to 
find, in every portion of the Word of God absolute, explicit, 
complete truths, nor anything which very nearly approaches 
them. The possibilities of language and of human thought, 
the wants of men, the general methods of God, and the 
apparent facts of the Bible forbid our entertaining this 
view. It lies neither on the surface, nor is it sustained by 
profound reasons. 

The style of interpretation, also, which has accom- 
panied a belief in the constant, controlling power of the 
* i Cor. xiii, 9-12. 



INTERPRETATION. 3 1 3 

Divine Spirit in the composition of the sacred volume, 
making it in a complete, immediate sense the Word of 
God ; does nothing to incline us to the doctrine. It has 
been too often trivial, sad, mischievous and replete with 
passion. When Knox stood before Queen Mary, and 
justified the measures of the reformers in resisting and 
constraining her action by citing the example of Samuel in 
the slaughter of Agag, of Elias in slaying the priests of 
Baal, and of Phinehas in thrusting through Cozbi and Zimri, 
he maintained his cause by examples impertinent to the 
case, and thereby drew away his own attention and the 
attention of others from the true grounds of justification.* 
Such a use of Scripture necessarily confuses, oppresses, 
misleads the moral sense. Remote analogies and alleged 
divine authority are made to do the work of sincere 
inquiry, exact reasoning, justificatory social principles and 
a gentle spirit. Doubtless the argument of Knox was a 
short, effective one, fitted to the temper of the times ; but 
it was none the less fanatical and dangerous, a sword that 
at its next wielding might be found in the hand of a 
maniac. The man sustained the plea not the plea the 
man. In our day this style of interpretation has from time 
-to time put large divisions of the church across the direct 
path of progress, intrenched them there behind the most 
dogmatic assertion, and made their faith justly a reproach 
and hissing. Slavery was sustained by Old Testament 
and New Testament, and the subjection of woman is still 
insisted on with like authority. A method of interpreta- 
tion which is now preposterous, — as in the instance of the 
Irish clergyman already adduced — now fanatical, and now 
obstinately and fatally wrong, goes far to condemn its 
initial assertion, that of equal, unfaltering inspiration. 
Another example of the perplexity and perversity of 

* History of the Reformation, Fisher, p. 365. 
14 



314 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

thought involved in a too rigid dogma is furnished in con- 
nection with Leviticus xi. 6. The hare is there spoken of 
as a ruminant. It has the appearance of a ruminant, and 
was doubtless regarded as one, though it is not. Did 
Moses share the popular error, and so repeat it in this 
passage ? This is a most natural and harmless supposi- 
tion. Put in place of it the supposition, that the Holy 
Spirit, in reference to this plain close-at-hand fact, design 
edly admitted an error rather than to state a scientific 
truth, and we have a feeble, perplexing, and dangerous 
conclusion, in place of a most simple one. In either case 
the error is there to be explained and guarded against ; 
but on the one theory it is referable to popular ignorance, 
on the other to a concession of the Spirit of Truth. Which 
of these two sources of error can we deal with most readily 
and wisely?* 

If we take the opposite direction, and settle the degree 
of inspiration by the quality of the Scripture facts, instead 
of the quality of these facts by inspiration ; if we expect 
the doctrine, like the angel of God, to disclose itself in its 
divine mission ; if we give up the effort to cast a glamour 
of divinity over the human ; if we cease to assert infallibility 
and put ourselves diligently to the labor of finding truth 
sufficiently complete and reliable for the ends of life, we 
shall, in going to the Scriptures, need principles of inter- 
pretation. We have surrendered the idea that there is 
everywhere verbal precision, unmistakable assertions, 
formal truths directly applicable to our experience, we 
must then be able to inquire, to judge, to expound, and 
these processes imply underlying principles. 

We must study the Bible in the light of a correct phi- 
losophy. Science and philosophy alike should aid our 
inquiries, but preeminently philosophy. We are willing 
* Bible Animals, Wood, p. 100. 



INTERPRETATION. 315 

to put this statement in a bold way, because the truth of 
it is so staunchly denied or so constantly overlooked. The 
point of irritation is that those very parties who scorn the 
aid of philosophy in exegesis, or who profess to draw their 
scheme of human powers from the Bible itself, do often, as 
a matter of fact, bring to it a most perverse mental science, 
and, having distorted all its precepts into conformity with 
their governing ideas, excuse themselves from a fair 
defense of their philosophy and their method by retiring 
behind the authority of the Scriptures. They first press 
the Bible into their service, and then defend their illogical 
service by this unwilling recruit. It is not those who most 
decisively deny authority to philosophy, or most unreser- 
vedly yield it to the Word of God, that are always the 
most worshipful and reverential seekers after truth. 

Mental science as a science is as independent of the 
Bible as astronomy or geok>gy. The Bible gives no more 
evidence of being intended to teach one science than an- 
other ■ and philosophy stands in no other relation than 
chemistry or physics to the Scriptures, save that its facts 
are much more constantly and closely involved in the 
questions dealt with by inspiration and are correspond- 
ingly more important for correct interpretation. So far as 
Revelation touches upon facts that come under the obser- 
vation of science, it presupposes a knowledge of the prin- 
ciples of science that give a limit to its language and guide 
its thought. It does not itself turn aside from its primary 
purpose, but pursues this under existing knowledge, and 
subject to such modification as later discoveries may impose 
upon it. It does not turn revelation into the channels of 
science ; it does not call in supernatural power for this 
end. Yet, says Dr. Hodge, " It is plain that complete 
havoc must be made of the whole system of revealed truth 
unless we consent to derive our philosophy from the Bible, 



316 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

instead of explaining the Bible by our philosophy."* If 
we include in philosophy a statement of the powers of the 
human mind, there is no more reason why we should insist 
on drawing this from the Bible, than that we should inter- 
pret the facts of Geology by the first chapters of Genesis. 
Science in each and every branch of inquiry has to do 
with its own sufficient and independent proofs. It is left 
by Revelation to deal with its own facts, to search them 
out faithfully and interpret them systematically. It is not 
the office of the Bible to explain man, but its precepts 
and principles find their explanation in their application to 
such a being as man. What man's nature is, is a fact to be 
inquired into, and if the Word of God is not applicable to 
that nature, nothing can conceal its failure. The Bible 
presupposes man, addresses him as endowed with certain 
powers. The Bible does not prove the powers, gives them 
no exact and sufficient statement} but must itself be judged 
by its application to those powers when sufficiently and 
finally stated. Language does not primarily explain mind, 
but mind language. That the explanation may be recip- 
rocal, the two expounding each other, is undoubtedly true, 
but the prior fact is mind, and the order of intrinsic depend- 
ence is of language on the mind to which it is addressed. 
We infer the powers of the mind from the language 
directed to it only because that language has presupposed 
and been shaped to those powers. Our nature explains 
Revelation, not Revelation our nature. Revelation makes 
no pretension to furnish those exact statements which alone 
are mental science. 

A system of philosophy is involved in the Scriptures 

as in all dealings with man, but we are not, therefore, 

called on to evolve our philosophy from the Scriptures, if 

more abundant, immediate and plain facts lie elsewhere 

* Systematic Theology, vol. i, p. 14. 



INTERPRETATION. 3 1 7 

within the scope of inquiry. The Scriptures, in their pre- 
cepts, presuppose a knowledge of man to whom they are 
addressed, and only in a secondary way cast a rtflex light 
on his mental constitution. A system of hygiene presup- 
poses one of physiology, yet, in inquiry, physiology remains 
the primary and controlling science. It would be a strange 
and unreasonable inversion of procedure to insist that we 
must deduce our physiology exclusively from our rules of 
health, and this, lest independent inquiry should modify 
these practical conclusions. But it will be said, the pre- 
cepts of the Bible are absolutely correct, and so give us an 
immutable factor in the problem to which other factors 
must conform. Our theoretical philosophy is justly called 
on, then, to bend itself to these unmistakable conclusions 
which rest upon it. If the precepts of the Word of God 
were capable of an independent and exact interpretation 
antecedent to philosophy, there might be some truth in 
this statement. As it is, the precept so involves the phi- 
losophy, the nature of man, that its significance turns 
thereon. The constitution of man is one term in the pre- 
cept, and is always inserted at some value before the 
value of the precept can be known. 

There is no objection to drawing confirmation for our 
philosophy from the fitting explanation it brings to human 
action, to the dealings of man with man, to the dealings of 
God with man \ this is a wise method, but to put an inflex- 
ible construction on Scriptural assertions, and then bend 
our view of the facts in man's nature to which they pertain 
to our exegesis, is to do our philosophizing first, blindly, 
unconsciously and deceitfully, and afterward subject our 
clearer, more deliberate thoughts to these prepossessions. 
We establish our premises in darkness, and use the light 
only to get our conclusions from them. Exegesis proceeds 
safely only in view of all the facts to which the language 



318 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

pertains. We must know men, if we are to understand 
the way in which they are addressed, the methods in which 
their actions are dealt with, the regenerative forces set at 
work upon them. The method is explained by the material 
and the purpose, rather than these by that. This is the 
primary direction of thought, and it can not be wholly dis- 
placed by that which is secondary. 

A philosophy of man is, therefore, needful to a full 
and correct apprehension of the Scriptures, and is in order 
of work prior to it. It does not thence follow that that 
philosophy must always receive an antecedent, theoretic 
statement. The unelaborated, unconscious philosophy of 
the popular mind is often nearer the truth, and so more 
wholesome, than the philosophy of the philosopher. But 
it does follow that the theologian, aiming to carry system 
into religious thought, must do it by the aid of an antece- 
dent, sound philosophy, a correct rendering of man's 
powers, whose relations and discipline are under considera- 
tion. It is vain to strive to understand a system of sanc- 
tions, of rebukes and encouragements, of impulses to a 
new life, and to measure that new life itself, unless the 
being who is the object and subject of them all is also com- 
prehended. Knowing something of man, we may know 
something of the fitness of God's dealings with him. The 
two terms of theology are God and man, and the controll- 
ing term, that is the one to whose powers all things are 
conditioned, is man. 

There are two false methods of dealing with philosophy, 
or metaphysics, as its enemies love to call it. The one 
belongs to those who reverentially warn off this form of 
discussion from the Scriptures, as too positive, too com- 
plete in themselves, too divine to admit human philosophy, 
and then in their dogmas furtively inclose such a philoso- 
phy, in a most dismal, irrational form, forcing down all 



INTERPRETATION. 319 

things under the hard, cold will of God. These stern 
theories, subduing the human soul into impotence, are 
brought to the Bible, not developed from it ; are surrep- 
titiously stolen from the realm of philosophy, the proper 
field of warfare over them. In that battle-field the ground 
may well be trodden often and trodden hard in that pro- 
longed struggle in which man wins himself to his own 
uses, his own laws, his own life. We relish not this being 
drawn into the temple of religion only that we may be 
overawed by its sanctity in asserting our rights. We have 
already seen that not till freedom is established is there 
any, the least, room for religion, as there is no basis of 
moral government in man's nature, nor any proof of a 
Moral Being from whom such a government can spring. 
Both terms sink together ; God goes down with man in 
those all-engulfing natural laws and natural forces, which 
inwrap the universe through its every zone from pole to 
pole. A terminology may remain, but the things them- 
selves are no more. We are impatient of a deceptive phi- 
losophy set to do the work of religion, and thereby relieved 
of its proper responsibilities ; yet wasting the very field it 
pretends to cultivate, making sad havoc with the lives of 
men, their spiritual powers and religious hopes. A claim 
to immunity is a first step toward tyranny. 

A second treatment of philosophy, scarcely less cen- 
surable, belongs to quite the other wing of inquiry, com- 
posed of scientists and literary critics. They reject phi- 
losophy as a thing of abstractions, unverifiable ideas, yet 
proceed at once to deal with man, society, theology, our 
present moral state and future hopes, as if they had not 
discarded the very branch of knowledge essential to such 
inquiries. To bring to these themes ideas that can be 
derived from no other source than philosophy, and verified 
nowhere else, and then to hope to hold in peace the recon- 



32 O A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

structed domain of duty and religion because metaphysical 
discussions have been rejected in set terms, is a method 
that is able to escape the charge of dishonesty only by 
that of stupidity. Philosophy, equally for believers and 
unbelievers, is the field of religious conflict. Here the 
attack must be made, and here sufficient defenses set up ; 
since religion is spiritual, supersensual, interpretative in 
its force. The questions we wish to answer are, What 
faiths are valid in the soul of man ? what faiths spring 
legitimately out of, and hence may rule wisely in, that 
soul ? Christianity, all religion, ultimately stands or falls 
by its hold on the human mind. Without this, historic 
proof can yield no strength. Nothing is religious till the 
mind of man" makes it so, and the religion that is evolved 
under and for his powers in their highest development 
will stand, as at once an essential product of his own con- 
stitution, and a necessary element of its farther unfolding. 
This language may seem to some strange, but it is as 
deeply reverential as that it displaces. Man's nature is 
God's work, and what is given in it is given by him. The 
hidden things of the world are entered into by spiritual 
powers, and there, not elsewhere, are their foundations 
and verifications. The correlation is absolute between 
truth and the mind of man, yielding to that truth the per- 
ceptive element ; if it fails, truth fails with it. To warn 
philosophy away from the Bible, is to reject the only facul- 
ties that can ever make a Revelation of it, understand or 
use one of its great principles. The Bible does not create 
the spirit of man, it finds it ; and its glory and defense 
are, that it approaches it so wisely, with such perfect 
adjustment to its powers. First man, then the Bibl~. 
Philosophy, sound philosophy, is the torch by which we 
read the sacred pages. It is the flickering, wind-blown 
light of this torch in the years past and passing which, 



INTERPRETATION. 32 1 

more than any other cause, makes them to be a period of 
uncertainty and unbelief. When man finds himself, his 
own spiritual vision, he will find God ; the two discoveries 
are so close to each other as to be almost identical. 

But this makes our God, we are told, only a large- 
limbed man, so anthropopathic is our method. It might 
be well to inquire whether the conclusions of the human 
intellect are less completely anthropomorphic when made 
in one direction than in another ; when man sets up his 
systems in behalf of necessity, than when he constructs 
them for liberty and power ? Are those who reason in one 
way, giving one interpretation to the universe, referring it 
to a Maker, alone human, carrying their forms of thought 
and their familiar ideas with them, while those who evolve 
it and reevolve it are in some way extra-human, with no 
tinge of restriction in their procedure ? Are we not all 
equally enclosed in our premises ? Do we not all reason 
from the principles we find applicable to the world and 
ourselves ? If we do not, we are certainly censurable as 
neglectful of our true data. He is wrongly anthropo- 
morphic who is too definite, too precise, too dogmatic, who 
settles at once form as well as substance, distance as well as 
direction. It belongs to us rightly to reason from our 
own idea, under our own laws, by our. own connections, 
toward things beyond us. When we are most thoroughly 
anthropomorphic, when we rally all our powers, when we 
interpret truth by nature and by man, by things without 
and things within, then shall we have the most reasonable 
hope of making our nearest approach to the conditions of 
being and stages of knowledge that are linked to, yet trans- 
cend, those about us. When we have been winged by 
skepticism, and in maimed flight can only flutter in the 
air ; when we have lost stroke on the spiritual side of our 
being, and are each instant sinking earthward, is our 
14* 



32 2 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Divinity, our Infinite, likely to be more or less full in the 
resources of being ; to hold, and have to yield, more or 
fewer of the elements of salvation ? If it belongs to "the 
not-ourselves " to disclose God, does it less belong to our- 
selves ? Far off, very far off is God, but he is at once the 
nearest and the greatest when the soul, measurably forget- 
ful of " the not-me," — as an antithesis to the me — looks 
straight outward, upward, through an atmosphere colored, 
mellowed and glorified by its own affections, to the Author 
of its being. God is more and higher as the maker of 
man than as the maker of all things besides him. Yet 
this assertion turns on philosophy, on the question, whether 
man is essentially more in the law of his being than nature ? 
Answer this in the affirmative, and we draw near to God 
in drawing wisely near to ourselves. This means of 
access — anthropomorphic if you choose to call it so — was 
prepared for us in the beginning. God created man in his 
own image, in the image of God created he him. Indeed, 
some likeness somewhere is the essential condition of any 
knowledge of God. 

Again this door — I am the door — is thrown open in 
the incarnation ; God disclosed in and through Christ. 
Christianity stands or falls through philosophy, a philoso- 
phy of liberty and spiritual intuitions. An incarnation of 
a nature alien to that of man is impossible. The thought 
must be as the word which is to convey it. As firm as is 
our belief in the spiritual powers by which we apprehend 
— not comprehend — God, so firm will be our belief in the 
Being disclosed by them. If we must approach religion 
with a sound philosophy before we can reach its out-lying 
principles, its first proofs, it should not astonish us to find 
that a wise philosophy is the first condition of wholesome 
exegesis. 

The good and the evil in our own constitution, physical 



INTERPRETATION. 323 

and intellectual as well as spiritual, must be understood, 
the good and the evil in the world and in society, before 
we can apply correctly the principles of the Bible. The 
antithesis of religion to the world, the flesh and the devil 
will be fanatically misapprehended in one direction or 
another, till we have learned wisely to separate all that is 
admirable in human action and character from all that 
mars it. An off-hand searching of Scripture is sure to be 
a mistaken one. " I pray not for the world, but for them 
which thou hast given me." We may pick up these words 
of Christ quickly, and find their significance in mere will, 
the preference of God ; on searching them more deeply, 
we may see in them the inherent impossibility of bringing 
blessings to those who do not seek them, to those who 
have not given themselves to the truth, and so been given 
by it to its cleansing sequences; we may see in them, 
the identity of God's action, the soul's action, rational 
action. 

Another condition of correct interpretation, if we look 
upon Revelation as uniting itself closely to the condition 
and wants of those to whom it was primarily addressed, is 
historical criticism, a historical inquiry into the character 
of those to whom and through whom the Divine Word was 
given. The general nature of man gives the general con- 
ditions of Revelation ; the degree of development, the ten- 
dencies to obedience and disobedience belonging to those 
to whom that Revelation was directed, constitute a farther 
restriction. If language is explained as addressed to man, 
it is farther explained as addressed to such and such men, 
as shaped to their comprehension and necessities. Prac- 
tical, religious truth has two resolutions, into general 
principles, and into variable applications. Into these enter 
personal and transient conditions, causing the truth, in its 
immediate use, to lose something of its generality, and 



324 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

accommodate itself to the case before it. From applica- 
tions we get back to principles, from the special uses of 
truth to its general statements, by eliminating the restric- 
tions and accommodations that have been put upon it by 
the blindness of men and the obduracy of circumstances. 
Thus the principle is on the wing again, resumes its equi- 
poise, and awaits new conditions. 

The Bible has arisen under historical limitations, much 
of it under strict and narrow ones. As the narrative of 
events, the message of prophets, or the letters of apostles, 
it has felt the full force of the times with which it was 
dealing. National history, national character, personal 
character have been controlling, constructive forces. If 
Revelation appeared through human agents, under such 
limitations, and by submission to them gained fitness, the 
power to do its work, then the more clearly we recognize, 
and the more frankly we confess the fact the better. So 
fundamental is this truth that no exegete can or does 
wholly overlook it. The difficulty is that many, under an 
inflexible theory of inspiration, do not give the weight to 
the fact that belongs to it. They are fearful of allowing it 
its free range ; they concede a general application to 
special statements without divesting them of the restric- 
tion of circumstances. They prefer implicit to wise obedi- 
ence, assent to inquiry. It is no more true of the institu- 
tions and statements of the Scripture than of other historic 
developments, once right always right. It is the life not 
the form that is to be retained. The variable conditions 
of use are as distinct an element, one to be as uniformly 
considered, as the general principle on which it proceeds. 
The two together make up the case. The slavery and 
polygamy of the Israelites involve the principle that human 
rights are not absolute, complete, every moment applica- 
ble ; but variable, subject to the shifting relation of the 



INTERPRETATION. 325 

parties. But this truth assented to removes all authority 
from scriptural precedents as applied to present facts. 
We are left subject to our own conditions, with the duty 
of putting them in the best practicable adjustment with 
the wants of men ; assured that the wisdom and good-will 
of our social laws will be their only vindication. Not only 
does the past bring no authority to the present, it may 
rightly be put upon its defense by us, and we may inquire 
whether its acts and truths, institutions and principles, were 
in such accord as the circumstances allowed. 

Truths come to us through the Scriptures as do prin- 
ciples by common law. They are derived from cases 
decided under them, but wisely derived by omitting the 
peculiar features of each case, and penetrating to the 
spirit of justice on which it rests. We have also to deter- 
mine how far peculiar perversity, the '"hardness of men's 
hearts," have wrenched aside the principle in its applica- 
tion, carrying it even beyond the limits of strain to which 
the general conditions of progress subjected it. 

Thus the truths of Scripture are to be watched and 
followed and rejoiced in as living principles, making their 
way slowly against many obstacles under many abridg- 
ments, and coming forward on each fresh occasion, at 
each relaxation of pressure, to assert something more, to 
claim a new field, with greater freedom and higher tenden- 
cies of thought. This constraint of dark times, obdurate 
races, and untoward conditions on Revelation ; the perverse 
historical facts with which it has all along been wrestling, 
must be present to the mind in bringing forward and apply- 
ing afresh the truths of Scripture. Without this we are 
transplanting the old stock, not growing the new one 
from it. 

A guide to interpretation quite akin to this of historical 
criticism, is a right estimate of the changing intellectual 



326 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

temper of the human mind. At present men magnify 
natural law in the government of God, and there accom- 
panies this tendency a feeling strongly adverse to all inter- 
vention. The ages to which the composition of the Scrip- 
tures fell were controlled by the reverse spirit. The dis- 
tinction had not been firmly drawn between the natural 
and the supernatural. The reverence of a believing race, 
like the Israelites, showed itself by a constant and direct 
reference of events to God. They were not careful to 
distinguish between his action under natural law and his 
action beyond it ; indeed this idea of law had slight hold 
on the mind, had received no adequate statement or suffi- 
cient enforcement. They did not well separate what God 
does from what he allows to be done. Pharaoh was raised 
up for the very purpose of disobedience, and his heart 
hardened like steel for this service. The sense of divine 
power showed itself by an immediate reference of all events 
to God, by allowing his will to express itself as directly in 
the transgressions of men as in their obedience. The Old 
Testament narratives receive an unmistakable coloring 
from this reverential but uncritical temper, this truth of 
feeling and error of thought. Its words have in them a 
force we must abate in reducing them to exact terms, since 
they group under one form of expression, natural and 
supernatural events, the direct and the permissive govern- 
ment of God. As the ancients did not think as we think, 
their language can not be regarded as the equivalent of 
our language. 

In the New Testament, though this tendency is reduced, 
it still remains. The present outlines of thought were not 
drawn. Distinctions, important intellectually, but not sig- 
nificant in their immediate, emotional bearings, are not 
made, or if made, not steadily maintained. We are bidden 
to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, 



INTERPRETATION. 327 

for it is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of 
his own good pleasure. These words bear a different 
construction to the purely reverential and the profoundly 
critical temper. They may be looked on as an unqualified 
assertion of the constant, creative preeminence of the 
divine will. So faith, with a freely submissive cast of 
feeling, will regard them. They maybe taken to include 
the will of God in the righteous will of man ; work out 
your own salvation, for in your willing and working God 
works and wills. The highest will of Heaven adds itself 
to, and expresses itself in, the will of its servants. The 
one or the other view will be to us more fit, more reveren- 
tial, according to our estimate of the nature and worth of 
human freedom. 

We know how a biography is colored by the reverence 
of the writer \ how special providences multiply themselves, 
and spiritual elements obscure natural ones, when the 
attention of the narrator is directed primarily to the vic- 
tories of faith, to the oversight of those of wisdom and 
industry. We need to bear a tendency like this in mind in 
reaching ourselves the exact truth. The early, uncritical 
and devout temper prevails in the Bible, depresses the 
natural, exalts the supernatural, and confounds the lines 
of division. A tendency characteristic of a primitive 
period was farther intensified by a peculiarly powerful race 
development. The same forms of speech remain with the 
Arabs of to-day. Baker, in his Nile Tributaries, says, 
" The conversation of the Arabs is in the exact style of 
the Old Testament. The name of God is coupled with 
every trifling incident of life, and they believe in the con- 
tinual action of divine special interference. Should a fam- 
ine affect the country, it is expressed in the stern language 
of the Bible. ' The Lord has sent a grievous famine upon 
the land,' or, 'The Lord called for a famine and it came 



328 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

upon the land.' Should their cattle fall sick, it is con- 
sidered to be an affliction by Divine command ; or should 
the flocks prosper and multiply during one season, the 
prosperity is attributed to special interference."* 

Mailer speaks of this diversity of view and of expres- 
sion which characterizes different periods and races as a 
mental parallax, and well says, that if we fail to make 
allowance for it all our readings in remote times will be 
erroneous. " Nay, I believe it can be proved that more than 
half of the difficulties in the history of religious thought 
owe their origin to this constant misinterpretation of 
ancient language by modern language, of ancient thought 
by modern thought.' 1 f ' : In short, no man, we said, who 
knows nothing else knows even his Bible." t " The admir- 
able maxim of the great mediaeval Jewish school of Bib- 
lical critics : The Lord speaks with the tofigue of the children 
of men — a maxim which is the very foundation of all sane 
Biblical criticism — was for centuries a dead letter to the 
whole body of our Western exegesis, and is a dead letter to 
the whole body of our popular exegesis still. " § Indeed, 
no exegete can honestly, fully proceed on this maxim, till 
he surrenders the dogma of complete inspiration, and every 
thorough exegete has, therefore, in his thoroughness vir- 
tually abandoned it. 

We are not speaking of these diverse methods of thought 
as better or worse in one instance than in another, but as 
different and so requiring attention in transfer. Truth 
does not escape the effects of the medium through which it 
discloses itself, any more than light the changing states of 
the atmosphere, and this is a simple fact to be considered. 
To estimate the good and the evil of each phase of thought 
is not so easy. For this no single canon suffices. The 

* Pre-historic Times, p. 426. f Science of Religion, p. 25. 

% St Paul and Protestantism, p. 7. § Ibid, p. 31. 



INTERPRETATION. 329 

ready reverence of an uncritical time may often fall short 
of true worship, and the reluctant worship of a critical 
period may sometimes include the profoundest reverence. 

There are, as intimated, two directions in which this 
atmospheric coloring in the Scriptures is peculiarly strong. 
The first is along the boundary line of the natural and the 
supernatural, the second is along the division between 
human liberty and divine activity. The language of the 
Bible is popular, and as neither of these distinctions 
is much thought of or clearly held in view in early times, 
we must expect to find the same forms of language applied 
indiscriminately to both kinds of action, the natural and the 
supernatural, the human and the divine. In the immatu- 
rity of thought, the supernatural and the divine would 
necessarily be the gainers as against law in nature or lib- 
erty in man, since reverence would delight in this imme- 
diate, submissive reference of events to the Maker of all, 
and would not be able to correct its view by the profounder 
truths of law. This parallax between the positions of faith 
and criticism in looking at religion demands the attention 
of the exegete, and must bring frequent corrections. Pre- 
pared, as we are, freely to recognize the supernatural, we 
would yet remember how readily it steals into the domain 
of law and duty, and subverts them. 

A fourth guide to interpretation is found in evolution 
as applied to revealed truth. Few fail in some measure, 
consciously or unconsciously, to accept this progress of 
Revelation; most fail to admit it freely to its full extent. 
A continuous, progressive unfolding of divine truth is 
made necessary by the nature of man. So long as man's 
capacities, his spiritual powers, are on the increase, so 
long must there be a corresponding gain in scope and 
clearness of the truths which are to call out and sustain 
that life. Fixed dogmas, formulated statements can not 



33© A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

do this work. The more exact and final are the terms 
which truth assumes, the more narrow is its influence, the 
more rapid its decay in power. Truths which are to deal 
with a living spiritual nature must have corresponding 
scope and growth, must be about it, no matter whither it 
moves, as fresh, invigorating, richly colored air, giving to 
familiar things new disclosures. No loss could be greater, 
no limitation more disastrous, than that falling to our 
religious nature from the possession of final, sufficient 
dogma. Religious truth above all truth will be perpetu- 
ally restating itself in the earnest, vigorous mind. 

The nature of truth also compels this progressive un- 
folding. Some convictions antedate others, as being their 
conditions, and making the mind ready for them. The 
individual, the nation, the race, require to be thoroughly 
schooled under one type of discipline before they can 
profitably take up a succeeding one. The training of the 
human family presents, in extended treatment, the same 
order of growth which the individuals of each generation 
pursue up to the then existing point of race-development. 
What has been done by any considerable number of the 
race has been done for all its individuals, and these easily 
reach the front rank in truth, unable as they may be to 
pass beyond it. Justice, law, stern omnipresent order, 
are the ideas on which the conception of holiness rests. 
Not till the wide-spread, imperative force of spiritual prin- 
ciples is felt can the excellence of obedience, expressed in 
the word righteousness, be apprehended. Large experi- 
ence, patient drill, severe suffering are requisite for im- 
planting, even in a limited way, this conception of law. 
To spiritual training is added later a scientific definition 
of physical law, till these foundations of order are sunk 
deeply and broadly in human thought, and a correspond- 
ing elevation and beauty are imparted to holiness, the 



INTERPRETATION. 33 1 

structure of character, that rises freely and faithfully from 
them. 

Love as a supreme spiritual endowment can only fol- 
low after the idea of righteousness. If it were introduced 
earlier, it would degenerate into good-natured indifference, 
a dull perception often falling short of the radical and 
constant distinction between good and evil, and foolish 
affections spreading quite beyond the limits of wisdom. 
Love as a divine attribute, a pure affection, must be pre- 
ceded by a calm discernment of spiritual order, and an 
unflinching adhesion to it as the only sufficient safeguard 
of happiness. 

That there have been progressive stages in Revelation, 
corresponding to this growth in the mind of man, and this 
interdependence of truth, is plain. An illustration is 
offered by the divine character as unfolded in the Scrip- 
tures. When God communed with Abraham, he is repre- 
sented as in a measure ignorant of the events transpiring 
on the earth. u And the Lord said because the cry of 
Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is 
very grievous, I will go down now, and see whether they 
have done altogether according to the cry of it which is 
come unto me ; and if not I will know." In the same con- 
ference the yearning compassion springs up as entreaty 
from Abraham, as if mercy were on this side rather than 
on that, " Oh, let not the Lord be angry, and I will 
speak yet but this once. Peradventure ten shall be found 
there?" 

A representation of this character would scarcely be 
possible in the New Testament, while the New Testament 
conception, as transcending the thoughts and so the wants 
of the Patriarch, would be equally misplaced in this narra- 
tive. In a kindred way is the character of God regarded 
by Moses. " Furthermore the Lord was angry with me for 



33 2 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

your sakes, and sware that I should not go over Jordan, and 
that I should not go in unto that good land."* Again, 
" Furthermore the Lord spake unto me saying, I have 
seen this people and behold it is a stiff-necked people. 
Let me alone that I may destroy them and blot out their 
name from under heaven ; and I will make of thee a nation 
mightier and greater than they."f This reference of oaths 
to God in the Old Testament finds, as an act of accom- 
modation, its explanation in the epistle to the Hebrews. 
" For men verily swear by the greater ; and an oath for 
confirmation is to them an end of all strife. Wherein 
God willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of 
promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by 
an oath." 

We see how fully David appropriates the love of God 
to himself, yet, in spite of his reverence, with some distor- 
tion of our Heavenly Father from his equal affection and 
common fatherhood to the race of men. " Blessed be the 
Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and 
my fingers to fight ; my goodness and my fortress ; my 
high tower and my deliverer ; my shield and he in whom I 
trust; who subdueth my people under me."| This cleav- 
ing of the soul to God in its own daily activities is indeed 
most healthy, and chiefly healthy because it helps to cleanse 
those activities, and bring into our own life the divine life. 
Yet if we look at the way in which David sometimes waged 
war, and ruled his subjects, we should be slow to commit 
the grace and justice of Heaven so unreservedly to his 
deeds, to believe that his bloody hands received all their 
cunning from on high. The attitude of David is devout 
and just, but it subjects the character of God somewhat to 
his own character, and confirms his anger by the anger of 
the Most High. 

* Deut. iv. 21. f Deut. ix. 13. \ Ps. 144. 



INTERPRETATION. 333 

God, as primarily the God of the Israelites, is present 
to the mind of the prophet Isaiah, as to the other prophets, 
in a spirit quite too narrow and passionate for an exhaus- 
tive statement. "In this mountain shall the house of the 
Lord rest, and Moab shall be trodden down under him, 
even as straw is trodden down for the dung-hill."* "The 
sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made fat with 
fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the 
fat of the kidneys of rams : for the Lord hath a sacrifice in 
Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea."t 
" The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man, he shall stir 
up jealousy like a man of war ; he shall cry, yea, roar ; he 
shall prevail against his enemies. 7 '! In these as in many 
other passages it is evident that the overshadowing senti- 
ment is that of justice, retribution; and' one tinctured with 
national traits and interests. The prophet evidently does 
not hold fast to the conception of a spiritual discipline 
simply that is to accrue to the benefit of the whole world. 
The portentous aspect which divine providences were 
assuming, expressing as it did a portion of God *s character, 
was keenly felt, sharply rendered, and boldly uttered; 
yet on its narrow national side, under the spirit and 
temper of the times. How could it have been rendered 
otherwise, or otherwise rendered, have been profitable ? 

When we pass to the New Testament, these limitations 
of a national worship and deity disappear. Neither are 
justice and judgment any longer the great work of God. 
Our Father which art in Heaven becomes the form of 
universal address. "Take no thought saying, What shall 
we eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or, Wherewithal shall we 
be clothed ? for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have 
need of all these things. "§ "Are not two sparrows sold 

* Isa. xxv, 10. f Isa. xxxiv, 6. 

% Ibid, xlii, 13. § Matt, vi, 31, 32. 



334 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

for a farthing ? and one of them shall not fall on the ground 
without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are 
all numbered."* "The Lord is not slack concerning his 
promises as some men count slackness ; but is long-suffer- 
ing to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that 
all should come to repentance. "t "God is love; and he 
that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. "$ 
This great advance in the conception of God, unmistaka- 
ble as it is, is not fully expressed in these detached pas- 
sages, but is wrought as a change of spirit into the two 
dispensations, one so profound as to issue almost inevita- 
bly, notwithstanding that it lay in the line of progress, in 
a conflict between them. On what did this transformation 
of ends and methods rest? Certainly not in a change in 
God, but in man's knowledge of him. It is a growth in 
the central conceptions of religion, a gathering up of the 
lower in the higher, a falling of secondary attributes into 
the shadow of a supreme purpose, and a new light of Rev- 
elation fitted to this advancing truth. There is no reason 
to think this progress is at an end ; quite the reverse. The 
Divine Character is not exhausted, nor growth on our part 
complete ; correspondingly glad conceptions are in reserve 
for us. 

It would seem as if all stereotyped expression were 
carefully avoided in the Scripture, or rather that the truth 
is never sheltered in expression from the force of chang- 
ing circumstances. The commandments at the second 
rendering are not quite what they are at the first ; nor yet 
the Lord's prayer ; while the beatitudes and the Sermon on 
the Mount are greatly changed. This emphasizes the spirit 
of truth, while dealing very lightly with its letter, and looks 
to those changing, growing visions in which lies its power. 

* Matt. x. 29. f 2. Pet iii. 9. 

\ 1 John iv, 16. 



INTERPRETATION. 335 

We have glanced at an evolution of doctrine in one 
direction, the implanting of seed-truth and its steady 
development from generation to generation ; there is cor- 
responding progress in other directions. The doctrines of 
the New Testament are every way broader than those of 
the Old Testament. Out of modified, enlarged character, 
are seen to spring up enlarged relations. God assumes 
toward us new attitudes. In Christ, he becomes our coun- 
sellor and friend, in the Holy Spirit, an omnipresent, vivi- 
fying, spiritual presence. He ceases to stand apart as a 
ruler, and draws near to renew by his love a temper of 
obedience and wisdom. He becomes the recreative heat 
and light of his spiritual realm. The hopes and aims of 
men are proportionately broadened. The doctrine of im- 
mortality is definitely enforced, and what is more, the plan 
of life is made constantly to include it. We need not 
dwell on this ; the Bible language plainly covers this pro- 
gress. The second covenant is a new covenant. " In 
that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. 
Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to van- 
ish away." * Paul speaks of " the revelation of the mys- 
tery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now 
is made manifest"! Christ likens the new truth to the 
new wine which must be received in a new bottle. What 
fact is more pregnant than this in exegesis, that one pre- 
sentation grows old and makes way for another, that truth 
is resown in the present rather than transplanted from the 
past. 

There is in discipline an accompanying and corre- 
sponding development to this in doctrine ; indeed there 
can not be growth in one without growth in the other. The 
training of the Israelites was national more than individ- 
ual, exterior and ritualistic rather than interior and spir- 
* He. viii. 13. f Rom. xvi. 25. 



$$6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

itual, by visible and interested motives more than by- 
invisible and disinterested ones, with unbending and 
explicit command in the place of wise counsel and wide 
liberty, and by the constant mediation of a priesthood and 
local service instead of direct personal communion, at all 
times and in all places. The discipline of the Israelites 
was collective, formal, mediate, authoritative, and in 
motives temporal and restricted. The spiritual light back 
of this training was indeed constantly breaking through, 
but such was its cold, sterile aspect to the sluggish, com- 
mon mind. Yet religion and the religious nature can 
nourish themselves by their own impulses in every stage 
of society. It is here as it is in government. When the 
conditions of order are deeply planted in the popular 
mind, then free institutions are possible and fit, but when 
rule can neither be wisely established nor firmly main- 
tained except by external authority, then this authority 
becomes necessary. If the minds of men are so generally 
and so thoroughly possessed by religious truth as to come 
freely and easily under its guidance, religion can commit 
itself to the individual mind and conscience ; but if igno- 
rance, mingled idolatry and irreligion, are prevalent, the 
solution of the problem of progress must be taken from 
the many, incompetent to deal with it, and be committed 
to the few, for the establishment of a uniform national dis- 
cipline. Questions of religious order thus fall into the 
hands of a permanent priesthood, and an authoritative 
method prepares the way for a voluntary one. Only thus 
is there any faith, law or discipline. A national religion, 
wholesome and salutary, is possible under conditions far 
too low to admit of individual responsibility or liberty. 
A national religion must be administered by a priesthood, 
must be enforced by immediate, cogent motives, and put 
in affinity and mutual support with existing social and 



INTERPRETATION. 337 

political institutions. For such a school the Israelites 
were ready, and not for one higher. But a national reli- 
gion is necessarily one of rites, in its outstanding features 
exclusively one of rites. A priesthood can reach the 
people only through the forms of actions. The spirit and 
power of religion are beyond their cognizance, and beyond 
the capacity of the average mind in the low condition now 
indicated. To intrust a pagan temper with moral duties, 
or to charge it with spiritual affections, is impossible. 
These require thought, insight, impulses in a measure sub- 
ject to the truth, and delighting in it. The Israelites 
could have made nothing of evangelization, good-will, 
philanthropy. Just and tender sentiments must first be 
enforced upon them in connection with a ritual, which put 
religion in a crass, palpable form before them, and gave 
them something to do commensurate with their powers. 
This, their purifications, sacrifices, feasts, temple-service 
did for them. These became the frame-work of a religious 
discipline, took active possession of their lives, taught 
them protracted and precise obedience, incidentally dis- 
closed to them the attributes of God, and gave occasion 
for national sympathy and enlarged kindness. The ritual 
of the Israelites as enclosing them, setting them apart to 
a peculiar training, laying duties upon them, subjecting 
them to religious impulses, and disclosing to them first 
faintly, then more clearly, the unity, purity and searching 
government of God, justifies itself as a transitional portion 
of a progressive Revelation. How thoroughly it did its 
work, is shown in the way in which the unity and sove- 
reignty of God were impressed on the Semitic mind, and by 
it on the civilization of the world. This first point was 
made, and so made that it became the sufficient source 
of a much higher, freer, more spiritual unfolding of truth. 
Since the time of Christ, as darkness has reigned, dogma, 
IS 



338 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

rite, authority have been uppermost in the church, and 
advantageously so. As the grounds of freedom have been 
won in intelligence, these have given way, and the indi- 
vidual has wrought for himself according to his power. It 
is not unfortunate that liberty must be won by valor, since 
wisdom and courage are the conditions of its maintenance. 
Liberty is a dangerous thing to give. 

Christianity, in its full development, admits no third 
party. It leaves each soul with its Maker, to live by the 
immediate ministrations of Heaven, and to enlarge its 
life under them. The words of Moses are grand words, 
but they are not the words of Christ, " And now, Israel, 
what doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to fear the 
Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, 
and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with 
all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and 
his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy 
good ? " * The first part of the requisition would have had 
but little value for Israel without the remainder. Com- 
mandments largely ceremonial were, with them, the girding, 
guiding lines of character. Christ leaves us with the 
simple living force implied in the principle, "Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind : and 
thy neighbor as thyself." f Here is a spirit which searches 
and guides every rational mind, no matter what its orbit. 

There is indicated in the Bible narrative a correspond- 
ing progress in practical morality. The duplicity of Jacob 
came to him and passed through him in the line of inherit- 
ance. The struggles of David, in which he suffered such 
signal defeats, were those of his. generation, a generation 
deeply sunk in appetite and passion. Paul, on the other 
hand, is wholly possessed by one devout and zealous im- 

* De. x, 12, 13. f Luke x. 27. 



INTERPRETATION. 339 

pulse j while John is lifted by unfailing affection. Con- 
trast David and Paul, both men of action ; of deep emo- 
tions, large purposes and great resources ; both men of 
devout belief and spiritual insight, and we can not fail to 
see, that while they are baptized into one faith, it is with a 
wide diversity of service and spirit ; that the conquering 
strength of Jehovah is passing into the winning love of 
Christ. Polygamy, slavery, the subjection of women, every 
social sin, one after another, must inevitably fall off from 
this expanding faith, this truth finding every day new, more 
living and more tender ministrations. The church is, in 
its progress, its only example to itself. The prophets 
hastened on their mission, breathing into the Jewish ritual 
a deeper, more comprehensive, holier spirit. " Is not this 
the fast that I have chosen ? to loose the bands of wicked- 
ness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed 
go free, and that ye break every yoke ? " * The true 
prophets of Christ are to-day under a like inspiration 
modified by the good and the evil about them. 

A fifth very subtile, but very important, principle of 
interpretation is that involved in the words of Paul ■ " The 
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." A quick insight 
into the spirit of an assertion, and a relatively light esti- 
mate of its form or letter, a power to look in the direction 
in which the speaker or writer was himself looking, to 
catch with him the formation of the thought, as it pro- 
ceeded before his mind, and to apprehend easily the limit- 
ations and limping utterance which language, as exact 
expression, was liable to put upon it, are essentials of 
instructive, stimulating exegesis, and this the more as we 
approach the most significant portions of Scripture, the 
words of our Lord. These, while they unite themselves 
closely to an occasion, are ever opening out into principles 
* Is. lviii, 6. 



34-0 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

broader than it. Through the vista offered by the events, 
as through the rift of clouds into the blue beyond, are lines 
of vision into the high, calm regions of eternal truth. 
These searching principles are often given by Christ as 
daring figures, bold contradictions, and a wresting of 
speech from familiar and conventional service to one 
strange and transcendent. This spiritual insight, consist- 
ing in sympathy with the position and outlook of the writer, 
is allied to that literary spirit, in its highest, best form, 
insisted on by Matthew Arnold. A comprehensive grasp 
of a single truth can only be reached by a knowledge of 
many truths. For this reason Christ seems often to have 
simply pronounced principles of action, and then to have 
left them unsupported, unexplained and unapplied. Ade- 
quate support, explanation and application were impossi- 
ble. These truths were left, and of necessity left, for the 
mind to return to again and again under its enlarged 
experiences. They were allowed in simple magnitude to 
hold possession of the spiritual horizon, like great moun- 
tains, bringing their sublime and varying lessons as shift- 
ing lights and the spirit of beholders should give them 
opportunity. 

" To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, 
passing and literary, not rigid, fixed and scientific, is the 
first step toward a right understanding of the Bible. 
But to take this very first step, some experience of how 
men have thought and expressed themselves, and some 
flexibility of spirit is necessary, and this is culture."* 
[t may be thought that the fruits of this form of criticism, 
as exemplified by Arnold, are not such as to commend it. 
On the contrary, this spirit seems to us to constitute his 
chief power, and to impart to him at times marvellous 
penetration, a penetration the value of whose results is 

* Literature and Dogma, Preface, p. 12. 



I NTERPRETATION . 341 

impaired only by a deficiency in another equally important 
condition of interpretation, a sound philosophy. His 
weakness lies, as it is wont to with all of us, in what he 
despises, and his strength in what he highly ^esteems and 
patiently acquires, the power to leave one's own position 
and to draw near to that of an author. 

This principle of literary criticism, of an interior 
widening of the idea of a writer not under his language, 
but under his controlling conception, renders misleading 
and nugatory, the system of textual proofs. This system 
ascribes to the language of the Scriptures a precise mean- 
ing, and to isolated passages formulated truth, which do 
not often belong to them. They are as frequently direc- 
tions of thought as sections of thought. They require the 
observer to take a certain position that he may look along 
them, through them ; and will not suffer him from any and 
every position to look at them, as ground-plans of truth of 
definite proportions and complete measurements, to be 
taken off by dividers and reapplied by measuring rods. 
The textual method, as a method, is unsafe, and to be 
narrowly watched over in every one of its uses. 

These are the leading facts of which a vigorous and 
safe exegesis is to possess itself, the facts of our own 
nature, of philosophy ; the variable facts of history and 
national character ; the facts of evolution in human 
thought and sentiment, with the complementary fact of a 
progressive revelation ; and the fact, that in all profound 
spiritual truths, the mind struggles with them, striving to 
penetrate them beyond the occasion and the language at 
hand. If there is to be given in interpretation to these 
facts, we will not say the exact weight we have assigned 
them, but any sufficient weight, then it is plainly possible, 
nay it must have been contemplated from the beginning, 
that one race one period, one class of minds should take 



342 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

a partial, an inadequate view of truth, and that other 
races, periods,, and persons, working beyond these first 
impressions by means of them, should give to the truth a 
deeper and more spiritual rendering. In other words, 
religious statements are not absolute, exhaustive for all 
times and persons, but offer a series of dissolving views, 
each succeeding one in the line of preceding ones, but 
more suggestive, more brilliant, more consoling than they. 
Our spiritual nature grows, and it grows by shifting con- 
ceptions, conceptions which are the last statement, but not 
the final utterance, of truth. There is in this no mystery 
beyond that of growth ; if there is growth, then there is 
this change of intellectual elements incident to it. 

Many illustrations offer themselves of this modification 
of belief. Punishments in the divine government are wont 
to be regarded at the outset as direct, physical inflictions, 
associated with the sins which they correct by arbitrary 
appointment, and constituting the chief deterrents to 
transgression. They come later to be looked on as largely 
spiritual, as enclosed in man's ethical and physical consti- 
tution, as certain slowly to develop themselves under the 
laws which rule in man and in the world, and as adding 
themselves to positive inflictions as far greater persuasives 
to obedience. We do not consider what limits should be 
put to this tendency ; the tendency itself is undeniable, 
and as undeniably an elevating one. The government of 
God, under the one impression, rests down as a foreign 
authority upon man, and calls in retributive agents to 
coerce him ; under the other, it is deeply rooted in his 
nature, and proceeds by his own constitutional forces to 
establish itself, and complete its rewards and penalties. 
The authority of God is thus set up within the soul itself, 
is involved in every act of life, unfolding itself as its ra- 
tional, constructive law. This conception, however, is 



INTERPRETATION. 



343 



alien to the uninstructed mind, and finds its way into the 
thoughts step by step as they enlarge themselves. The 
language of our Saviour concerning retribution takes either 
light. It presses down on the sensual mind under its sen- 
sual imagery as enduring torment, and it comes to the 
spiritual mind with a spiritual tenor, consonant with its 
own states. The flames are not the flames which fiends 
are kindling, but those which the desires and passions are 
feeding. The fact of punishment does not change, but its 
forms are modified, suiting themselves to the mind which 
contemplates them. 

This flexibility is in the Bible language. No details of 
punishment are given, the words are vague, figurative, sug- 
gestive, and while they deliver faithfully to all their warn- 
ing, they leave them to render it into such specific inflic- 
tions as they find in the forecast of their own experience. 
" He is the wise man who sees at once that all is image, 
prejudice, symbol, and that the image, the prejudice, the 
symbol are necessary, useful and true."* 

Another illustration of variable truth is offered by the 
words of Christ in which he established the Lord's Supper. 
We know how the emphatic declaration, "This is my body," 
has been a stumbling-stone to many, and led to most per- 
plexed and irrational interpretation. One mind through 
original constitution or protracted misdirection can not 
wing its way lightly over the words to their spiritual pur- 
pose, while another, of easier poise, finds in them no 
obstruction. The apprehension of the manner in which 
Christ is present in the emblems of sacrifice must, in each 
instance, turn on the sympathies, the intellectual tenden- 
cies, of the soul. Those who have the largest reserve of 
spiritual suggestions will be least inclined to admit a 
mysterious transformation and supernatural presence. 
* Religious History and Criticism, p. 392. 



344 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Take this language of Christ and trace the history of the 
doctrine of this sacrament, and we shall see how impossi- 
ble it is for a sluggish or sensual temper, or one strongly 
biased by an established tendency, to escape the danger 
of approaching this sacrament with ill-defined reverence 
and fear, and expecting from it physical rather than purely 
spiritual results. The words of Christ allow this miscon- 
struction, while they freely submit themselves to every 
breath of spiritual expansion. 

Again, God is said, as in Isaiah, to have created his 
servants for his glory. Each mind must necessarily give 
this language the force which for it attaches to the word, 
glory. If glory is found in holding, using, subjecting men, 
then for this purpose has God shaped them. If glory 
accrues to God from their free, self-guided, intelligent 
action, then God has framed them for this end. The fee- 
ble spirit can not mount by the conceptions of the stronger 
one, nor the stronger be held down by the burdens of the 
feebler. Each walks, or runs, or flies on eagle's wing, as 
it is given to him to do by his own powers. When Christ 
told the twelve apostles that they should sit upon twelve 
thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, what inadequate 
physical conceptions of coming honor took possession of 
their imaginations. Large, fruitful interpretation involves 
as its condition growing powers, ripening experiences, cor- 
rected sympathies, trained insight. ' He that doeth my 
will shall know of the doctrine.' It is impossible that 
truths which contain so large an emotional element as do 
many of those that pertain to religion, should disclose 
themselves otherwise than slowly, with the reservations 
and limitations which the poverty of the individual heart 
imposes on them. Hence also no class of truths expand 
more rapidly under the clear, sympathetic eye than these 
truths. In reference to none do we feel surer that it was 



INTERPRETATION. 345 

in this general direction, along this ascending way of 
light, that the thoughts and feelings of the writer were 
mounting. " Criticism may and must determine what the 
original speakers seem to have directly meant, but the very 
nature of their language justifies a?iy powerful and fruitful 
application of it, and every such application may be said, 
in the words of popular religion, to have been lodged there 
from the first by the spirit of God."* 

The advantages of this bold, earnest, penetrative 
interpretation are manifold ; they are like those which 
belong to the acceptance of an inspiration such as is 
indicated by the facts before us. It of all exegesis elicits 
inquiry, demands sincerity, flows out of and leads to 
intellectual and spiritual growth. We are left to ourselves, 
put to proof, as to the use we are disposed to make of 
truth when it has been announced to us. why should we 
not also be put to the same proof in the use of our powers 
in obtaining the truth ? It is enough that approximate 
truth is within our reach. The conditions of discipline 
are thus fully met. Under any circumstances each mind 
must settle for itself the authority of authority, the claims 
of the most clamorous dogma. Does not this ultimate ref- 
erence of certainty to itself look to a trust, on the part of 
the mind, in its own powers, and a diligent use in all 
times and places of its own resources ? 

If this is the type of Revelation, if this, as we believe 
it to be, is the cost of Scriptural truth, that truth, in its 
mode of presentation, is most analogous to the truths of 
nature, is most deeply imbedded in them, and is engaged 
with them, on the simplest terms of fellowship, in one 
joint kingdom. We attach the highest importance to this 
concurrence of the instruction of the Bible with the train- 
ing to which man is subjected in his physical, social, his- 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 97. 



346 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

torical relations. In these are the permanent conditions 
of growth, and the transient, auxiliary, supernatural ones 
unite easily with them, and subserve their purposes readily 
under an agreement of method. If, on the one side, faith 
is authoritative, and help a simple gift, while, on the other, 
wise belief is the product of patient inquiry, and success 
is conditioned on skill and labor, the lessons which the 
one school enforces the other disparages, and man is left 
to vibrate between the religious and the practical, the 
trusting and the speculative impulse, with small prospect 
of reconciling them, and uniting them in a harmonious 
life. The primary, the permanent instruction of man, as 
manifestly provided by Heaven as that of Inspiration, is 
that of nature ; and an exegesis which gives free play to 
all the forces involved, which carries forward natural into 
revealed theology, stands united with these initial terms 
of growth, starts at the beginning and so is ready to pro- 
ceed to the end. 

This view also makes man a more complete party to 
the Kingdom of Heaven. It seems to some a gain to dis- 
parage man, to exclude him from control, to remand him 
decisively to the position of a servant, to gather up all power 
in the divine will, itself unchallenged. To these persons a 
spirit of inquiry, of concurrence and co-labor, has but little 
to commend it. Yet it is certain that the world matures 
the strength of man, and wins for him moral beauty only 
so far and so rapidly as he is trained to devise and to 
execute the wise and good thing. The excellence of his 
constitution is found not in what can be done for him, but 
in what he can be led to do. This is a fact as emphatic 
in the moral, as in the physical or intellectual world. 
Nothing is more incommunicable than virtue, nothing more 
personal, more of the nature of individual power. In no 
acts more than in acts of holiness does God include his 



INTERPRETATION. 347 

will in the will of man. A schooling that is from the 
beginning one of growing insight, enlarged freedom and 
creative power, stands in closest contact with the generous, 
invigorating, cherishing love of God. We are thus properly 
heirs of the kingdom, and joint-heirs with Christ. 

Interpretation of the kind now urged makes difficulties 
and errors light, and takes from them the power to injure. 
They are in religion as in science things of course, and 
open to easy correction. They only work a passing mischief, 
and even for that bring a compensation in the enlarged ex- 
perience which eliminates them. The natural, the human 
element bears off the mistake, and leaves the supernatural, 
the divine element unimpeached. Our hasty judgments are 
not passed back to us certified under the seal of Heaven. 

] t will naturally enough start up as an objection, that 
if philosophic history, literary criticism must underlie 
exegesis, the uneducated mind abides under great dis- 
couragements in its approach to God's word. It certainly 
does, if, as unexpanded and unspiritualized, it looks for 
an exhaustive comprehension of the truth, to possess itself 
of it at once and fully. If, however, it more modestly and 
more wisely asks for something just at hand commensurate 
with its wants, nothing is more varied and flexible in adap- 
tation than the Word of God. Its slow historic growth, 
its repeated submission to natural conditions of the most 
primary character, fit it to lay an immediate hold on every 
grade of culture. The fact that it lets fall lessons so easily, 
of so many kinds ; that it is so possible to be known in 
part and understood in part, adapts it for immediate 
and humble service. The uncultivated mind, moreover, 
if honest, may have its advantages. It may be grounded 
in a practical, working view of human nature, in a true 
philosophy, in a sense of power and responsibility, and 
perchance also of guilt and of want. It is purely a problem 



34-8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

of conduct, of encouragement, that it brings to the Bible, 
and nothing can be clearer than the preceptive and sym- 
pathetic side of Revelation. It is no unreasonable bar to 
a free and successful approach to the wisdom of the Word, 
that it makes best answer to one well-grounded in all 
coincident truths of history and human nature, to one whose 
experience has helped to teach him the evils to be 
removed, and the methods of their removal. 

It will as easily be objected, that we must, if each man 
is left to his own exegesis, encounter at once the endless 
disasters and divisions of erroneous criticism. Certainly, 
there are dangers in meeting the conditions of growth ; we 
do not therefore turn aside from growth. Have no divisions 
and disasters attended on authority? Has not rather the 
scrupulous, syllabic weighing out of words occasioned as 
bitter, as blind, as bigoted divisions as can in any possible 
way be called forth ? as cold, as formal, as worthless unions 
as may by any method be reached ? The mistakes of 
growth, of a sincere spirit, find instant compensation and 
slow correction ; the mistakes of authority are from the 
beginning unfortunate, and become more so every moment. 
God accepts the liabilities of freedom, it is our wisdom to 
accept them also, and under them to lay the foundations of 
prosperity. There will be a permanence and strength in 
the structure so created, tested and confirmed by experience 
in every part, not otherwise attainable. 

Divisions are unduly alarming to us, as if men must 
needs huddle together in fear or in faith before there can 
be any common safety j as if the blind belief of one helped 
to insure another, and danger was found only in solitude. 
It is hostility not diversity that is morally destructive, and 
the ease with which we admit the first, in an effort to 
exclude the second, is most irrational. There is nothing 
which pertains more exclusively to the privacy and idio- 



INTERPRETATION. 



349 



syncrasy of the person than belief. In it the mind must 
be let alone, must be left to its measurements and insights. 
With our beliefs others can have only an indirect concern 
It is not till they affect character, and strike out in con 
duct, that they directly interest our neighbors. We con 
stantly underestimate character and overestimate belief 
when the former is the chief significance of the latter. 
Unity of belief is hardly an occasion of sympathy, till 
belief tinges feeling, measures hopes, directs efforts, 
Mathematical truths, though they lie with absolute coin 
cidence in different minds, enkindle no common affections, 
Action, emotion, on the other hand, instantly interest our 
neighbor. A concurrence of purposes calls for a concur- 
rence of feelings, and would give the grounds of it in 
religion, did we not check coalescence by attaching a 
false value to doctrine, and so making its dissemina- 
tion a primary part of our effort. No man can predict 
what character will follow from a particular creed, because 
he can not say what portions of it will be made nutritive, 
how logically its tendencies will be followed out, how much 
depth of conviction will be implied in an assent to it, nor 
at what points it will find arrest or modification by coun- 
ter-tendencies. The real sympathetic grounds of union 
are thus not arrived at by a constrained unity of faith. 
The Scriptures are especially remarkable for dealing with 
facts and precepts, and rendering these spiritually operative 
under many diverse shades of doctrine. This unity of life 
is lost by a perpetual resolution of every truth into exact 
formulas addressed to the intellect, instead of into 
impulses addressed to the affections. Tne intellect is 
unyielding and proceeds by difference and division, the 
emotions are concessive, and made strong by coalescence. 
The grounds of fellowship are not, nor can be, on that 
side but on this. The purposes to which we put truth, the 



35° A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

honesty with which we seek it, the diligence with which 
we obey it, are the grounds of union. Likeness of results 
is pleasing primarily because of the confirmation it brings 
to our practical life. No agreement in theory can com- 
pare, as a bond of concord, with a strong attachment to 
the truth, and a disposition honestly to use it. No mind 
is to forego its own conclusions, but it is to recognize the 
fact that the value of these conclusions lies not in them, but 
in their power to minister to the mind that has fearlessly 
arrived at them, and honestly uses them. We must rec- 
ognize the independence of belief, its necessary diversities, 
its secondary value, its variable connection with character, 
and the supreme claim it sets up for freedom. In this 
recognition there is a better ground of union in sentiment 
than in any formulated truths whatever. If we could hold 
intellectual union more lightly, and cease to seek for it, 
we should find emotional union more readily. Harmony 
will sometimes best come to us when we have forgotten to 
pursue it. We insist on the truth because of what the 
truth can do; we would not therefore destroy its power to 
work in the way in which we get it. If we would have it 
free when won, we must leave it free in the winning. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Primitive Facts. Sin and Divine Law. 

IT was not because the conditions of man's physical 
being, or even of his intellectual being, were not com- 
plete, that Revelation came to him, but to call out and train 
his spiritual powers. These powers are awakened by 
supersensible ideas, and to impart to these ideas suffi- 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 351 

cient reality and cogency, and that too in the presence of 
overpowering, bewildering, misleading sensible impres- 
sions j to enable them to win their proper control, is the 
office of religion, of Revelation, as a historic force. Fun- 
damental among these spiritual conceptions which are 
to be brought by a spiritual discipline into the foreground, 
and made to rule the soul by its own conviction concern- 
ing them, are the moral law, sin as disobedience to it, 
righteousness as obedience to it. The development in the 
mind of a truly spiritual law as the grounds of a spiritual 
life, accompanied with an increasing insight into its 
breadth of application, into the spiritual forces, and 
ultimately therefore the intellectual and physical forces, 
that concur to sustain it, is the moral, the religious dis- 
cipline of the race. When this insight is sustained by 
the affections, and these are present in sufficient power 
to take easy possession of the will, and thus cause our 
higher life to proceed freely and joyfully under .its inner, 
its divine law, the soul is sanctified, made holy; conduct 
and character are righteous. 

The training is twofold, the inner law is to be seen 
in its universality of application and its motives are 
at the same time to be rendered efficacious. These two 
phases of growth proceed together. Experience will call 
out and confirm the moral affections, and at the same time 
by fresh insight disclose new fields for them. Meaning 
by the moral affections the feelings as drawn out under 
the invisible, moral relations of our life, we shall be holy 
in the degree in which they carry our action into all the 
directions open to it, and freely control it there ; in the 
degree in which they lay hold of conduct, and build it up 
under their formative forces as character, as a spiritual 
product, shaped throughout to the subtile conceptions of 



352 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

righteousness. Two things are involved, a universal law 
of action, spiritual incentives to sustain it. 

It may be thought that these incentives are not alto- 
gether invisible. They doubtless inhere more or less in 
visible things, but as ultimate, ethical motives they are 
purely spiritual. The prosperity and good-fellowship which 
may attend on righteousness are not, in their gross, sensi- 
ble qualities, its motives, they are only the kindly incidents 
of a level of life that always lies above them ; the things 
that come to the mind the more easily because it can so 
easily dispense with them, the enjoyments that pursue us 
when we have ceased to pursue them. 

We accept, as the highest unfolding of the law of our 
spiritual being, the words of Christ ; "Whosoever will save 
his life, shall lose it : and whosoever will lose his life for 
my sake, shall find it." Life is to be found in oversight 
of the sensible allurements that draw it quickly outward, 
and in imposing upon it within itself its own motives. 
This lifting the life of man from a servitude to sensible, 
appetitive impulses into its own invisible realm of spiritual 
incentives, and, at length, sending it forth thence so fur- 
nished with renewed powers as to take possession of the 
physical and social worlds in its own interests, in its own 
behoof, this is the province of Revelation, this the historic 
work of religion. Thus shall the meek inherit the earth. 

Of this movement, this religious development, there are 
three conditions. It must take place under incentives that 
are primarily personal. We state this thus distinctly in part 
because of the clearness with which Matthew Arnold has 
developed the bearings of religion on conduct, and yet 
referred them to impersonal forces, those forces in the "not- 
ourselves which make for righteousness." We grant that 
as this growth of our spiritual perceptions passes onward 
we are more and more impressed with the permeating 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 353 

power of righteousness, its pervasive control of results, 
its instant, constant hold on the universe. This is a conse- 
quence of the coveted religious training. God is seen to be 
acting through nature rather than on it. Things lose their 
indocility, their inflexibility, their physical estrangement 
to spiritual issues : they begin to make for righteousness, 
they flow together with startling sympathy, hastening on 
the rebukes of sin, or spreading far and wide the sunshine 
and smiles that attend on virtue, virtue that is so enlarged 
and firm as to be found entering on its inheritance. But 
even then nature is not the personality of God merged in 
cold, dead, material facts, it is coherent activity suffused 
with the wisdom and love of our Father, taken up into the 
fellowship of his omnipresent thought and power. 

That the idea of personality, as applied to the Eternal, 
is peculiarly vague and unverifiable we can not admit. 
Unverifiableness in ideas turns chiefly on the unfamiliarity 
of the mind with them, and on their complexity. Certainly 
no idea is more intimate to our very being, more within 
the scope of our experience, than this of personality. Com- 
plex it certainly is, but its central conditions are plain, 
and we need not, for its wise and safe and stimulating use, 
exhaust it in all its bearings. It is for some minds at 
least far easier to entertain the thought of a system of 
things that makes for righteousness through the kindly, 
controlling purpose of Him who frames it, than of a sys- 
tem of things that makes in a blind, dead way for rational, 
living ends ; that evolves aid, fellowship, virtue, with no 
apprehension of any of them ; that has the issues without 
the attributes of thought. " It shows great ignorance of 
human nature, and of God's modes of operation, to suppose 
that he would approach a darkened, sensual world by 
purely spiritual, abstract teaching." * 

* W. E. Charming, Life of, vol. 2, p. 444. 



354 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Moreover, it is such spiritual ideas, such invisible 
forces, as those which we refer to God in the world, that 
are to be developed, made clear, verifiable, living in our 
experience by the discipline of religion. For this very end 
religion comes to us, to emphasize the personal, to enable 
us to lay hold of the unseen and intangible, and render it, 
by a spiritual use and appropriation, into manifest, verifia- 
ble results. In any way to evade this issue is to foreclose 
growth. The development of our moral nature must pro- 
ceed under personal incentives, by contact with laws that, 
in their ordination as in their application, are personal, 
carry with them and have back of them choice, emotion. 
Virtue springs from all that is high, spiritual, personal in 
the soul, and can only be sympathetically kindled by like 
attributes in the world about it. A mere mechanism, no 
matter what the skill of its contrivance, has no hold on the 
affections. Whether, in its operation, it does good or does 
evil is immaterial, if there is no purpose, no feeling, 
expressed either by the one action or the other. It may 
impose on us new conditions of action, it may make new 
exertion necessary, or promise unexpected opportunities, 
but these alike resolve themselves into cold, formal grounds 
of activity, and do not in the least touch the spirit. If the 
whole universe is to be looked on as such a mechanism, 
then it, in equal measure, loses its hold on the affections. 
If its laws make for righteousness, they can still bring to 
righteousness no other or higher incentive than prudence. 
They call out no enthusiasm ; they can not meet thought 
with thought, affection with affection, aspiration with that 
sympathetic aid that carries it forward to fulfillment. " For, 
except in this conviction, the first and simplest, on which 
we have ever to fall back from more artificial and compli- 
cated theories — God is, and God is Love. I can see 
nothing in this life but a hideous, waste, howling wilder- 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 355 

ness, with siroccos and sand-pillars, overwhelming every- 
thing and scorching up everything."* 

If this is true of the clear-minded and high-minded, 
that, as spiritual beings, they move freely only under the 
condition of living powers in contact with kindred living 
impulses, the reason nourished by holiness, — the rational 
action of one who is holy — much more is it true of those 
sluggish in thought and groveling in tendencies, that 
nothing short of direct contact with personal authority, 
enjoining and forbidding, rewarding and punishing, awak- 
ening the attention and filling the ear with words of 
encouragement and admonition, can avail for the ends of 
discipline. The personal yields to the personal as it will 
yield to nothing else. It stands in awe of it as of nothing 
else ; and the sense of authority, of rightfulness, of guid- 
ance, is for it gathered up in persons. To persons it is 
wont to submit, to the impersonal it unconsciously and 
unceasingly asserts its superiority. 

As virtue comes from that which is preeminently the 
seat of personality, it calls for the personal, whether it is 
to grow by sympathetic contact, or to be impelled forward 
by law. Training is made up of two parts, the enlarged 
and enlarging laws which embrace conduct, and the cor- 
respondingly pervasive spiritual emotions which are to sus- 
tain and enforce these laws, and carry obedience forward 
into pleasure. These steps must be taken together; 
when the satisfaction in law falls off, the sense of law will 
cease to expand ; while each law of conduct, accepted and 
rejoiced in, will lead to other more remote, more subtile 
lines of action. That element, therefore, of discipline 
which makes the law an emotional force, a power working 
its own way in the affections, is absolutely essential to 
development. We cease to see when we cease to feel. 
* Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, vol. 2, p. 84. 



356 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

The personal element thus becomes that sympathetic, 
glowing, growing force which, under the law, like begets 
like, works on the rational life of the soul, and calls it out 
in clearer seeing and deeper feeling, in deeper feeling and 
clearer seeing. 

" Faith," says Arnold, " is the being able to cleave to 
a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self, 
not to our lower and apparent self."* This definition cer- 
tainly lies in the right direction, but what power but a per- 
sonal power, one comprehensive of, appreciative of, good- 
ness, can appeal to our higher and real self. An appeal is 
an effort to evoke sympathy, and the ' not-ourselves,' as a 
dead material force, can make no such effort. A statue 
can not appeal to our love no matter how finely chiseled. 
We can not cast ourselves upon it, we can not cling to it. 
The cold marble repels us, chills us ; or convicts our ten- 
derness of folly. There is no more universal law than this, 
that the cause must be commensurate with the effect, the 
forces which beget righteousness must be righteous ; the 
forces which stimulate and develop persons must be 
personal. 

We are carried back in a discussion like this at once 
to our philosophy. If righteousness is, in ultimate analysis, 
no enthusiasm, no irreversible law of life, but a quiet calcu- 
lation by which action is shaped to its conditions, or more 
exactly the law under which actions are shaped by its con- 
ditions into a certain coincidence with them, then, losing 
liberty, right and personality in ourselves, there is no rea- 
son why we should insist on them as facts of our so called 
training, as elements of our spiritual environment. Results 
one in kind, one in the law that controls them, with those 
of the material world, can easily enough be developed by 
material forces. We have, however, used a wonderfully 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 204. 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 357 

high-sounding, resonant and deceptive phraseology in 
speaking of such a development as holiness, righteousness, 
religion. 

If we lose personality on the one side we begin to lose 
it instantly on the other ; if the powers in the world which 
make for righteousness, are impersonal, righteousness itself 
misses its character, sinks into calculation, becomes a 
cunning, or if you please, a wise, adaptation of conduct to 
passing events. Add to this instant degeneracy of aim, 
by which we substitute an external comfort and relation 
for an internal state and law, the limitation in time, the 
loss of immortality, incident to it, — for on this point imper- 
sonal forces can give us no assurance, make us no promises 
— and our entire spiritual life is at once narrowed down to 
adjustments of a kind with those which fit the bird to its 
habitat, the beast to its forest range. Losing our hopes 
of a future life, we are either humbled to the fortunes of 
this life, or, still kindling our spirits to purposes of grander 
scope, we are overtaken with ineffable sadness that we 
have no sufficient promise of their fulfillment. 

Revelation, always involving a supernatural element, 
must proceed on the idea of a Divine Person. The Scrip- 
tures are saturated with it. Prophets and apostles would 
without it become speculators, moralists, reformers ; would 
•drop apart into the incoherence and conflict incident to 
human thought. The unity, the progress of purpose in the 
Bible, are due to the supernatural element, the revelation 
of God, which combines and carries forward with it the 
natural agents set in motion by it. There is thus disclosed 
a Power working out one purpose from the beginning to 
the end, raising up and using for its own objects its suc- 
cessive instruments, without either destroying their char- 
acter, or losing sight of its own plans. The natural is 
taken up into the supernatural, and the two into the king- 



358 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

dom of God. The power which makes of the Scriptures a 
series of Revelations, giving rise to a corresponding mo- 
mentous series of historical events, is the personal power 
which every partaker in these writings has found in 
God. One conception has ruled all alike, and given to 
them their message. If they had had to do with imper- 
sonal, natural forces merely, if they had missed the super- 
natural, their works would have fallen asunder like those 
of philosophy, they would have lost popular power, and 
commanded but a divided attention with the few. Rightly 
or wrongly, the Scriptures are what they are by virtue of 
the personal and supernatural. 

A second condition of religious development, deepen- 
ing the impressions of ethical law, and transforming them 
into those of religious law by virtue of our spiritual affec- 
tions, is, that it must be general, including the race. Race- 
development can alone compass any great movement; it 
alone has an orbit large enough to gather up and carry on 
multiplied, protracted, accumulated influences, to give com- 
plex truths their manifold expression, to bear them forward 
in action and from that action to come back to their fresh 
elucidation. There is something strange and subtile in 
the ease with which the individual appropriates what the 
race has won, when contrasted with his inability materially 
to transcend it. Here is the secret of civilization. A 
barbarous race may, in a few generations, come up well 
along side of those who have taught them, crowding cen- 
turies into years, but having done this, it then pursues 
the unexplored path of farther progress on the slow, hard 
conditions which fall to the pioneers of men. If a single 
race is intractable, unwilling to yield, or unable to yield, 
to the humanizing agencies that overtake it, these in turn 
become hostile, and rapidly destroy it. 

The ideas that are wrought into individual life, social 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 359 

life, national life, that appear in exalted types of conduct, 
are slowly accumulated by race-experiences. The idea of 
one supreme God was the lesson which the Israelites 
acquired by the varying but continuous discipline of many 
generations. The new truth is slowly consolidated into 
national character, national institutions, and so expressed 
has a firmness, a momentum, which make it rapidly and 
broadly effective. Thus Grecian art, and Roman law, as 
race-achievements, things done, have reappeared in 
European history and institutions. What the individual, 
by superior energy of thought or of moral nature, is able to 
achieve, fails in efficiency as it falls off in mass. Only as it 
works itself into a race, verifies itself in a national life, 
finds entrance into institutions, and shapes society, does it, 
as ground gained, begin to accrue to universal progress. 
The individual is always inclosed as a unit in a much 
larger factor ; he receives in overwhelming volume from 
men, and communicates to them slowly and with much 
resistance. It is first a race, then the race, that accumu- 
lates, consolidates and gives a practical, unconscious control 
to truths, above all to truths of character. 

Religious principles preeminently seek this large, this 
race, development. Its beliefs, like that of immortality, 
are of so intangible, so unverifiable a nature, as men are 
pleased to call them, that the individual can get but a 
slipping hold upon them. They call for accumulated 
impression, for the traditional force which belongs to pro- 
tracted and general experience, the best insight of many 
minds, above all for the purer and more peaceful faith 
which a belief in them serves itself to work out in cleans- 
ing the affections, and making truths whose medium is 
largely emotional, less flickering and unsteady. One 
measure of a strictly rational faith is possible to one spir- 
itual state, and another to another. Grounds of belief 



3^0 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

which are partially resolvable into trust and love must 
vary with love and trust, vary with the moral tone of the 
generation into which they have fallen. "An interlocutor 
in Cicero expressed what was probably a common feeling, 
when he acknowledged that with the writings of Plato 
before him, he could believe and realize immortality; but 
when he closed the book, the reasonings seemed to lose 
their power, and the world of spirits grew pale and unreal."* 
So easy is it for the faith of one or two to burn dim or 
expire altogether in a heavy atmosphere of unbelief. There 
is in this fact the deepest philosophy, for the conditions 
of faith, the food of faith, are wanting among the vicious 
and skeptical. • Faith must fasten itself in a sensitive way 
on integrity, and be nourished by its daily exercise. It 
is an air-plant that attaches to the thrifty limbs and trunks 
of sound growth only. 

Religious truths must find their practical efficiency in 
this their victory over numbers, each life lending its 
strength to all about it. A larger experience, a more 
manifold and varied test than is possible to one alone, an 
extension of them in application beyond the scope of pri- 
vate thought are necessary to our spiritual ideas to make 
them truly regnant. " Religion is neither founded nor 
overthrown by arguments ; it has its ground of being in 
the most imperious needs of our nature, the need of lov- 
ing, the need of suffering, the need of believing."! In 
other words, exact, mathematical ideas, sensible, verifiable 
conceptions are not the foundation of religion, but spiritual, 
emotional ones, that persistently return, indeed, but with 
changeable, vague outline ; ideas that are to be shaped, 
confirmed, verified by the growth of our entire nature, of 
man and society, under them. Only as they have ruled 

* History of European Morals, vol. i, p. 191. 
f Religious History and Criticism, p. 273. 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 36 1 

are they able to show their right to rule ; the proof 
increases every instant as the field enlarges. 

Moreover these truths are of that inclusive character, 
this development so lies along the paths of social and 
national as well as individual life, that it is impossible that 
reiigious discipline shall complete itself otherwise than 
under the broadest race-relations. The thing to be disclosed 
is the universality of religious law, and the variety and 
breadth of the emotional impulses which sustain it. Any 
breaking down of religious truth between man and man is in 
contradiction of the office it has undertaken to discharge. 
Wherever the influence of man goes, or from whatever 
quarter influence comes to him, there must be found a new 
disclosure of the power of religious truth, a new unfolding 
of the one spiritual life. 

A third condition of religious development is inherit- 
ance. For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting 
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third 
and fourth generation of them that hate me ; and showing 
mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my 
commandments. This law of inheritance assumes two 
forms, a physical and a moral one. The spiritual nurture 
of the household and the community transmits itself under 
the ordinary laws of influence in a most full and effective 
way. The child does not merely receive the counsel and 
follow the example of the parents, he is not merely born 
into the moral standards and under the institutions of the 
community, learning its emphasis ; the community and 
the household are every hour of his life giving to him the 
conditions of action, its irritants and counter-irritants, its 
incitements and repressments. What shall be called forth 
in the child, and how it shall be called forth, are settled by 
these anticipatory circumstances that enclose him at. every 
turn. Moral inheritance, the protracted gestation in which 
16 



362 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

every new-born spirit is held by the community, is insep- 
arable from that race-development on which individual 
development turns. If the discipline and culture which 
accrue to the individual, are to be far wider than anything 
which is possible to him alone ; if they are to extend over 
the broadest periods, gather in the most varied powers, 
participate in and carry forward the most manifold inter- 
ests, if they are to abolish at once and on all sides the 
boundaries of life, then the law of transmission must hold. 

Physical inheritance is more restricted, but not less 
certain, than intellectual inheritance. Moral qualities are 
closely affiliated with physical conditions, and these find 
a free transfer from parent to child. That inheritance 
transcends these two lines of descent, a transfer of moral 
influences in a moral form, and of physical conditions in a 
physical form, can hardly be shown. Talent, turpitude, 
virtue, pass by descent with no more fullness or certainty 
than these conjoint agencies would lead us to expect. 
Native, that is, primitive, tendencies and powers appear 
freely everywhere. The talent of the parents fails to 
guarantee the talent of the children, and children often 
disclose a sudden gain of intelligence, an unexpected in- 
tensity of moral force. 

A conjoint transfer of physical organization, — a condi- 
tion so subtile as to carry with it many habits — and of 
intellectual training, accompanied as this may often be 
with the most stimulating opportunities, is obviously suffi- 
cient to explain most cases of transmitted talent. Instan- 
ces of inherited ability are certainly not more numerous 
than we have a right to expect them to be. They also lie 
in a direction consistent with a joint reference of them to 
physical inheritance and intellectual training. Musical 
power has shown an unusual tendency to transmission, as 
in the family of Veit Bach. " Oftentimes more than one 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. $6$ 

hundred persons bearing the name of Bach, men, women, 
and children, were to be seen assembled. In this family are 
reckoned twenty-nine eminent musicians." * But musical 
power is peculiarly dependent on physical organization, 
and peculiarly capable, under favoring circumstances, of 
development. When ability of an unusual order passes 
from father to son, finding expression in the same line, as 
in statemanship in the Pitts and the Adamses, or in dra- 
matic representation in the Colemans, we are to remember, 
that most favorable and vigorous influences conspire to 
give direction to the talents of the children. 

Though these do not suffice to impart unusual ability^ 
they do suffice, this being given, to make the transmission 
complete and conspicuous. 

In the article by Papillon just now referred to, it is 
said, " On the whole, these cases of transmission of 
psychical qualities are not frequent. Their being so care- 
fully noted and so set in relief is apparently due to the 
fact that they are not of common occurrence ; and, besides, 
in many of the cases education had probably more to do 
than heredity . . . Cases of heredity will never be, in the 
domain of psychology, anything more than exceptions, as 
compared with cases that make against heredity." 

While inheritance is the law of those general forces, 
those social and intellectual influences, which are devel- 
oped under the growth of the community as the joint 
products of our generic life ; while even a stricter heredity 
attends on the physical organization of parents, there is 
none the less a primitive, psychical and moral element in 
man which finds no such explanation. Independent, ger- 
minant points are introduced along those lines of evolution 
which express themselves in physical traits and social 
status. The individual is never wholly lost in the race, 
* Popular Science Monthly, Nov. 1873. 



364 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

dependent as he is upon it. If there were no inheritance, 
the fruits of voluntary effort could not be gathered ; if 
inheritance covered every fact of succession, voluntary 
effort would be excluded, and the opportunity of gain lost 
on that side. 

Inheritance, inseparable from joint, social development, 
works with it to secure continuous and gigantic growth. 
It gives the preponderance of power to virtue in either 
line of transmission. As a transfer of physical qualities it 
makes for soundness and strength. The fittest survive. 
What is more, it puts under the control of man the physical 
organization of successive generations, and invites growth 
in these primary conditions of well-being. It discloses a 
law, lays open a possibility, enforces a duty, in the on-going 
of life from father to son, and thus includes in social pro- 
gress another and most efficient agency, encloses another 
line of activity within the pale of character. It serves 
also to disclose in a new direction the nature of vice and 
virtue, the virus of the one, and the vis viice of the other. 
Vice, the moment it enters the physical world as intem- 
perance, produces weakness, and transmits it. Vice thus 
becomes a verifiable force working death. Virtue, in the 
same realm, as temperance, brings health, imparts it, and 
makes everywhere with visible efficiency for life. 

The transmission of moral persuasives tends also to 
virtue, since it gives its truths those long periods which 
are requisite for their full development, their complete 
enforcement. The historic test is the great test, and this 
is that of transmission, of doctrines unrolled for their full 
reading to the last syllable that is in them, institutions 
developed in effects to the exhaustion of their power for 
good or evil. We owe much to the rapid, partial logic of 
deduction, we owe more to the surer reasoning of events. 
Virtue vindicates itself better in a broad than in a narrow 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 365 

field. She counter-works vice successfully only when vice 
is left for a long period, like a besieged city, to its own 
resources. It is not so much in the command of the 
present as in the command of the future, that right and 
wrong betray themselves. The momentum of the hour 
disguises the new forces operative on it. It is the com- 
pleted orbit that fully discloses them. A sound, social 
principle is necessarily at disadvantage in the beginning, 
as it goes to work on conditions that have been made 
ready by alien or by hostile forces. Destruction often pre- 
cedes construction, and for the time being disguises it. 
Time, if time is active, is busy at the demonstrations of 
virtue, and one by one she brings them to the light. 
Phases of social life, polygamy, slavery, have passed away, 
and can not return ; phases of belief, indulgences, limited 
atonements, lose their hold on the minds of men, and can 
not regain it, for thought has drifted away from them. 

Science and historic criticism also, placing from genera- 
tion to generation a larger and more varied array of facts 
at our disposal, cause us, in many ways, to reinterpret the 
past and the present, and to enter more exactly into the 
results of conduct. Thus the great discloser of character 
as a controlling agency is time, time that patiently analyzes 
the forces that are shaping events. What the moral truths 
of the world have been waiting for has been more time ; 
in the fullness of time each prophet comes, and only then 
can come. The law of inheritance enables virtue to take 
its appeal to the future against the misconceptions, per- 
versions and undeveloped tendencies of the present, enables 
it to nurse the seeds of success into full-grown strength, 
and matches it against its adversary by the patient, living 
forces that are in it. The law of transmission becomes at 
every step more manifestly the adjunct of virtue, and the 
condition of its victories. The gains of righteousness are 



366 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

thereby made self-perpetuating, permanent. Successive 
generations are born into the kingdom, being born under 
its improved physical conditions, and within the enlarged 
scope of its moral elements. The accumulated and accu- 
mulating powers of growth are made over to virtue, its 
stages are increasingly rational and calculable, and men 
and society come together into the possession of, and use 
of, an enlarged life. Little is given, much is won, and is, 
therefore, safely held by the wise thoughts under whose 
action it has been gained. Very little is possible by way 
of absolute gift in character either to man or society. 
Constitutions that are the slow outgrowth of experience, 
that have shaped their instruments and sustaining habits, 
and have bent circumstances to their purposes, can alone 
support themselves. The steps of progress are consecu- 
tive, and must be all taken. A leap leads to exhaustion, 
reaction, failure. 

The force of inheritance which inwraps the undeveloped 
buds of virtue, which wars against vice simply because vice 
wars against life, — the victories of a parasite ruin it like 
its defeats — is felt to bear at times with great severity, not 
to say with injustice, on the individual. The condition of 
the child under the heavy entail of sin, its physical life 
poisoned in all its channels, and the moral atmosphere 
which surrounds it such as to bring constant irritation to 
body and mind, seems most unfortunate and unkind ; yet 
to frame the law otherwise would be to take from sin much 
of its self-destructive force ; would be to hide its evil, and 
heal its wounds. It is no part of the present' scheme of 
things to make opportunities equal. Variety in tempta- 
tions, in difficulties, arises not only under this law but under 
every law, under original endowment, under the shifting, 
fortuitous combination of circumstances. Every form and 
degree of difference between man and man give rise to the 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 367 

same question in kind, if not in degree. This variety of 
opportunity is not a point of justice, but one of wisdom 
and good-will. 

That different dangers should fall to different individu- 
als is ingrained in the entire nature of things and of man, 
a principle unimpeachable in its operation. Personal love 
demands only that these differences should not arise arbi- 
trarily, unnecessarily, in the interest of some private pref- 
erence. The decrees of God, as they are often presented, 
are precisely of this arbitrary character. They are justi- 
fied on no ground but that of a supreme will, and will is 
no justification of any action ; will as will is irrational, it 
derives its reasonableness from the purposes it pursues. 
But inheritance, as a law of nature, a law of God, is not 
characterized by arbitrariness ; quite the reverse. So 
incorporate is it with our entire experience and discipline, 
that it is not easy to construct, even in imagination, any 
other principle in operation. 

The point at which the hardships of this law need 
reduction to our thoughts is doubtless the disaster of sin 
in one who is fully caught by the bewildering, driving cur- 
rent of hereditary evil. Such an experience is not to be 
interpreted by our own experience, nor are its results to be 
regarded as overtaking it in the same quick, absolute, irre- 
deemable way. No one sins beyond his perceptions. 
The moral element declines with the intuitions. The evil 
sinks into a physical one, and the needed redemption 
becomes one of external as well as of internal conditions. 
If we hold steadily to this first axiom of ethics, that trans- 
gression is a conscious violation of law, the condition of 
the transgressor, whatever it may be, is greatly softened ; 
and his misfortunes pass more and more from the spiritual 
into the physical world. Guilt and disaster no longer 
merge into each other as one composite, punishable 



368 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

offence. Each trial, moreover, is an opportunity, and 
used skillfully becomes, by the touch of a resolute will, a 
victory. Nor ought we to dogmatize with quite the cer- 
tainty we now do on the issues of adverse circumstances, 
and of character debased and depraved by them. The 
outlook is dark enough certainly, confining the eye to the 
things it sees and the issues of mischief manifestly in 
them ; these are not the directions in which to find occa- 
sion to heap up in gratuitous prophecy the anger of God. 
If we were content to leave the future more quietly, even 
more hopefully, to his expurgating and redemptive laws, 
we should find lighter offence to our sense of justice. It 
is our own assertions of evil that chiefly embarrass us. It 
is not so much what is, as what we venture to affirm shall 
be, which casts upon our faces the pallor of a great moral 
fear, the fear of excessive, rigorous, unforgiving punish- 
ments. The tenets of dogmatists may seek for these 
superlative motives, the dim vision of vice and unbelief 
may be startled by them, but it is sad indeed to rend with 
these unnecessary thorns the wise, tender heart of faith. 
It is the office of faith, of faith in divine wisdom and love, 
to shelter us from these alarms and wounds, alarms that 
provoke nothing but a deadly fear, wounds that let out 
only the life-blood of the soul, its courage and its confi- 
dence, its belief in a Holy Divine Father. Let us take 
punishment as a present, wholesome fact, and follow on 
with it as a wise, patient instrument, always subordinate to 
its ends. 

The scheme of discipline, among whose leading laws is 
this of inheritance, must be taken and weighed as a 
whole. The individual indeed yields to the many, the 
part to the w ? hole, yet the whole is for the individual, and 
shaped by the individual for common ends. The aggre- 
gate gains not only greatly surpass the aggregate losses 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 369 

by this combined life, but growth, large development are 
not possible to the individual in any other way. Human 
differs from brute life in its unfolding chiefly at this very 
point, the superior combination of its individuals, the 
degree in which they, as members, are taken up into the 
race as a whole. Every step of civilization, and yet more 
of Christian ization, is one of involution, an institution of 
additional dependencies. Hence, as all the possibilities of 
good to man are locked up in these relations of interde- 
pendence and joint ministration, whose central feature is 
this of transmission, we may gladly accept the law, while 
we regret the mischief which sin works under it. Yet the 
individual retains his individuality ; he is never sacrificed 
to a common exigency, never ridden down by a general 
law. His conditions may be made harder, his dangers 
greater, but the possibility of good still goes with him. 
His responsibilities never exceed his powers, his duties 
are graded down to his circumstances. The fact- of sin it 
is that perverts and distorts the soul ; the form of it with- 
out the indwelling power goes for little. A sluggish, dull, 
imperceptive life finds protection in its very' deadness. 
Its dormant germs may survive the rigor of the winter. 
It is the sin against the Holy Spirit that is not forgiven. 

The problem of transmission is one with that of sin. 
Sin is incident to the growth of virtue. It does not there- 
by lose its character. It still remains hateful, a thing to 
be allowed rather than that the conditions of freedom and 
religious life should be swept away. Explanations hardly 
make this first fact plainer. It is a primary fact in the 
present system, that it is open on various sides to partial 
failure through its pursuit of a higher voluntary life. 
Accident, disease, ignorance, vice are incident to powers 
to be strengthened and enlarged by use, to knowledge 
which is the fruit of experience, to righteousness which 
16* 



37° A PHILOSOPHY OF RFXIGION. 

rests on self-government. Are these gains worth the 
liabilities and labors by which they are reached ? Every 
strong, wise man answers, Yes, and with an emphasis pro- 
portioned to his integrity. The spirit of the system is the 
best spirit of its best members. Courage, strength, faith- 
fulness make light of any price they pay in the fulfillment 
of their mission. Every good man feels that he does well 
if he wins. 

Could these gains be otherwise won ? This is to ask, 
whether a thing can be and can not be at the same time. 
Our wisdom, our personal power are the product, the pecu- 
liar product of our experiences. These things are not 
otherwise to be gotten, nor have we any reason to believe 
that there are any equivalents for them to be attained on 
lighter terms. The sacrifices made in their behalf only 
enhance our estimate of them, deepen our pleasure in 
their possession. The wretchedness of the world is the 
renunciation that falls upon sin ; the liabilities of life are 
the fearful incentives by which we are pushed forward to 
a bold struggle. On either side the penalties of sin are 
redemptive. If we overcome, they measure our victory ; if 
we are overcome, they renew our motives to effort. Sin 
and suffering are parts of the system as one of freedom and 
intelligence, one dealing with incipient, sluggish faculties 
looking to growth, a growth which shall yield a rational 
kingdom, shot through and through with penetration and 
purpose, patterned and supported on either side by the 
reciprocal interaction of living processes. 

We are also much too near the beginning of things 
rightly to estimate them. The great possibilities lie in 
advance of us. The morning light has hardly risen. Go 
back a hundred years, and how sensibly is the view 
altered ! It is the end that is to make us utterly for- 
get the hardships of the beginning. Spiritual life has 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 37 I 

wrought only a little in society, only a little in the individ- 
ual. As it enlarges its work, binds it together, and hastens 
it forward, the evils incident to evolution will rapidly dis- 
appear, and its fruits become apparent. The light of day 
no more certainly scatters the discouragements of night 
than will the Kingdom of our Lord, as it advances, dispel 
its opening dangers. 

Under these conditions of growth, personal discipline, 
extended interaction, and a transmission of results, man is 
slowly brought forward to a recognition of the divine law 
or will, and a joyful concurrence with it. Perfection 
implies a complete recognition of all the laws of conduct, 
and a full, sympathetic response to them. Perfection is 
relative not absolute, progressive not complete. New 
relations of conduct are constantly disclosed, new connec- 
tions of man with man and of man with nature are discov- 
ered and instituted, and thus law is not only enlarged on 
old ground, but also gains new ground. The soul that 
bears into progressive conditions, intelligently and lovingly, 
its interior, expansive law, as at once its own constitutional 
order and the will of "God toward it, is moving in the true 
orbit of its being. Any other perfection would be limita- 
tion, arrest, decay. When the spirit has exhausted the 
conditions, the possibilities, of life, it has exhausted life ; 
and this growth of powers is indefinitely varied and aug- 
mented by the participation of each in the composite 
growth of the race. The new grounds of development 
thus accumulate more rapidly than the individual can 
exhaust them, and fresh phases of experience open in a 
thousand directions. As knowledge, action, life move 
forward, one is more and more overwhelmed by the wealth 
of resources opening to him. He covets a vigor of powers 
and length of years proportionate to these stretches of 
thought and enterprise, to this growth of character to be 



372 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

secured under them. Thus rational life gives itself grander 
and yet grander conditions of living. To move with spirits 
in this spiritual realm under its amplifying law, as one 
whom God cherishes and feeds from his infinite fullness, 
this is the soul's discipline and promise. 

The initial idea of spiritual development is law, divine 
law. What is the law of God ? What is that law of right- 
eousness with which, as rational beings, we are peculiarly 
concerned ? It is announced by conscience, the ethical 
faculty which discriminates between right and wrong. This 
law of righteousness is as broad as the guidance of a per- 
fect moral nature, and conforms in practice to the lines of 
action enforced in each soul by its own insight. Our 
moral nature is conditioned wholly on the faculty which 
discloses the right, no matter how narrow its present range 
of vision. If any being is unable to make, at a single 
point, this distinction, he is not a moral being, and can 
come under no spiritual law. He must be remanded to 
physical forces, which only can deal with him. But this 
faculty, as the central power of the mind, is rational, and 
is able to see the good and the evil in action only as the 
action itself, in its bearings, is understood. Hence all our 
powers of observation and deduction, all present and pos- 
sible acquisitions, are called for and put to constant service 
in preparing the conditions of sound moral judgments. As 
also conduct is colored by our affections, and can only be 
understood by virtue of broad and delicate sensibilities, 
every step in character, every movement forward, become 
conditions of a more complete moral life. The moral, the 
divine, law is thus broadened at each stage of develop- 
ment, and looks to the ultimate inclusion of all rational 
action under claims of varying intensity. No rational 
action is absolutely indifferent to character, in its imme- 
diate or remote bearings, and thus no action escapes some 



PRIMITIVE F-ACTS. 373 

guidance from the moral intuition, the architect of char- 
acter. Physical laws, so far as they touch conduct, claim 
obedience under the moral law, since obedience is the 
condition of that well-being toward which the conscience 
shapes our effort. 

The divine law, as law, is promulgated by our moral 
nature. This is evident in the fact that any direct com- 
mand, like those of the decalogue, receives its authority 
from our moral nature, is made ethically, spiritually, obli- 
gatory by it. The primary commands of God, those which 
pertain to character, appeal to the* conscience, attach 
themselves to us at this point ; secondary, positive pre- 
cepts, ritualistic ones, find an indirect sanction in the 
rightfulness of the Divine authority. A command which 
can not lay hold of the conscience in one or other of these 
ways ceases to be amoral force, is either a nullity, or, like 
a physical fact, addresses itself to our interests. The pre- 
cepts and principles of the Scripture are spiritual simply 
because they can reach and establish their authority over 
our spiritual nature. They meet its tests, and are one in 
kind with it. 

This is shown by the bold, concise form, the restricted, 
desultory form, of these precepts. The ten command- 
ments, while very comprehensive, are most inadequate 
unless entrusted to a discriminating, active moral senti- 
ment ; verbally they go but a very little way toward order. 
Regarded as indices of conduct, rendered in action by the 
spirit, the disposition, which underlies them, they are large, 
wise guides of behavior. This work of exposition, appli- 
cation, can be committed to nothing but our own insight, 
our spiritual powers. The precepts of the New Testament 
are unsystematic, fragmentary ; were called forth by the 
passing circumstances of those to whom they were 
addressed. Such precepts can not serve the purposes of 



374 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

formal law, designed to cover sufficiently, coherently and 
finally the entire field of action ; they do answer most 
admirably the ends of education, awakening and guiding 
the moral sense, giving to it an insight that is ready to 
accrue to the benefit of character in all its bearings. The 
precepts of the parent, entering at an exigency, develop 
the strength of the child under its own constitution. 

Our Saviour is more careful to enunciate principles 
than to shape precepts ; to announce, as in the two great 
commandments, the feeling which should underlie action 
than to insist on its- precise form. This method implies 
moral discipline, an ultimate reference of action to the 
perception of the agent. Formal law, law whose authority 
is in the lawgiver simply, proceeds in quite another way ; 
it is tyranny and adopts the methods of tyranny. 

The progressive form in which the instructions of the 
Bible are given, lead to the same conclusion. It is an 
adaptation to growing powers. Laws externally con- 
structed and sustained, shaping the life under them by 
their own force, would not be thus dependent on times and 
seasons, would not follow up each insight with a new 
unfolding. The fact that law grows, discloses its seat in 
a living soul, that it is a handwriting of God, not on a 
table of stone, but in the heart of man. 

The moral, the religious discipline of man is found in 
deepening and enlarging the sense of divine law, and in 
leading the whole soul to rejoice in it. But as the divine 
law is expounded and developed by conscience, religious 
training resolves itself into awakening the ethical intuitions, 
calling out under them the spiritual affections, and putting 
at their disposal that broad knowledge which enables them 
to carry a law of spiritual life into every department of 
action. So long as knowledge can be enlarged, social 
relations multiplied, and sympathies deepened, so long is 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 375 

there occasion for the development of the inner divine law 
of life, so long is there room for growth. 

A discipline of this nature can be initiated at an} 7 point 
at which right and wrong can be disclosed. It is impos- 
sible to say that any knowledge, as knowledge, is neces- 
sary to salvation. It is the mind's discovery of its own 
law of life, and attitude toward it, that are essential ; no 
matter how partially, or in what direction the law is first 
seen. Any obedience prepares the way for a larger revela- 
tion, and a growing activity. No belief, as a belief, brings 
salvation ; it is the mind's action in believing and under 
belief that conditions character. Sin is a conscious struggle 
against the moral law, holiness a conscious adoption of it. 
These forms of action, opposed in nature, tend to exclude 
each other, and the mind is forced, therefore, to a decisive 
choice between them. 

The development of the race as a whole is closely 
analogous to the growth of each individual in it. Our 
first parents, without transmitted or personal experience, 
without, therefore, a law of moral action clearly defined 
in any direction, were open, like children, to very blind 
impulses. In the child the moral intuition is first called 
out by authority. It comes in to fortify the command of a 
parent, and is quickened under these commands. The 
race, in its childhood, required the same preponderance 
of explicit command, external authority, ritualistic religion. 
The personal and formal, the narrow and definite, injunc- 
tion, came to the aid of incipient powers, that could not 
master their own laws, or reach the conditions of inde- 
pendent growth. The sentiments of the parent, his appro- 
val and disapproval, interpret for the child, in a most 
vivid and impressive way, the character of action, and put 
him on its contemplation. The pleasure and displeasure 
of God, his personal feelings enforced on the worshiper 



376 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

in a variety of methods, correctly and erroneously, bring 
to him the same schooling. A priesthood, through whom 
the religious bearings of actions find definite expression, 
a national life, which shapes its fortunes under a common 
faith, suffers common disasters and chants common peans, 
are to a race, as a household to a child, conditions of 
training. 

From this slow tutelage, which constantly rests back 
for its value on the awakened moral sense, the race is able 
at length to pass over to its majority, to that development 
in which the religious life is left chiefly to the privacy of 
each spirit, in which the law becomes interior and rules 
the conduct by intuitions, judgments, affections, by the 
bent of growth. The moral nature, immature and narrow 
in its decisions, underlies this movement ;■ is first awakened 
by personal authority, and so led through law and justice 
up to wisdom and grace. From outside authority it passes 
on to inside order. The divine command coalesces with 
the divine life, as in Christ, and so goes forth to cover 
every department of action. 

This growth, history, philosophy and science unite to 
aid, since they give the clues to individual and social 
progress. Character becomes more and more the one 
product toward which all production tends, the one con- 
dition on which all prosperity hinges. The physical world 
is put into perfect ministration to the spiritual world, and 
gathers from it additional beauty and order. 

A development that throughout involves choice, and 
thus the slow accumulations of experience, necessarily 
starts with relatively feeble, incipient powers ; since power 
itself, as the safe, rapid use of faculties is to be the pro- 
duct of discipline. It is the very nature of training to 
oegin low down, to be satisfied if it can make a single pre- 
liminary point. This schooling of the race, first laying 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 377 

strong hold of its collective life, is transferred more and 
more to individual development. It substitutes for conven- 
tional law private conviction, for customs conduct that is 
built up by hourly insight. A discipline that first concerns 
itself with external action, and enforces itself by interested 
motives, gradually discloses the internal law of life, and 
fastens itself on the affections. That which came as a 
command is at length incorporated into living powers, and 
yields its impulse in daily pleasures. The soul, in this 
training, first seeks the Kingdom of Heaven as something 
without itself, and at length finds it within itself; it first 
stands at the foot of Sinai, lending a trembling ear to dis- 
tressful authority, and at length sits at the feet of Christ, 
in possession of that better part which shall not be taken 
from it. 

Throughout, the personal element never disappears. 
So supported, the moral law, though present in a very 
imperfect form, may gain a growing hold on the life. The 
government which the moral nature is not yet ready to 
set up and administer, is set up and administered by 
king, priest, prophet, who give distinctness to a will in part 
at least the will of God. When spiritual insight has been 
developed, though the seat of authority is transferred to 
the heart, though the will of God is seen to be expressed 
in physical and spiritual laws which work righteousness, 
the personal element is not lost. It has threefold force in 
the obedient spirit, as obedience has been from the begin- 
ning rendered to it and rendered by it. Personality is 
lodged in the moral nature, and is developed in its ruling 
sympathies as this is strengthened. A soul so awake to 
its own rational life preeminently craves contact with 
rational life. Though the physical universe ceases to be 
alien to God, or alien to ourselves, when we conceive it as 
offering and holding permanent conditions of progress, yet 



378 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

it comforts the spirit, and quickens the soul, only as it is 
felt to be permeated everywhere with the divine thought 
and affection, and so permeable with our thoughts and 
affections. The personal element which has before been 
concentrated in manifestations, commands, providences, is 
now diffused as a gracious presence through every work 
of God. 

We hold fast to the personal being of God, that is, to 
his conscious, rational being, for only thus can the universe 
make answer to the soul of man, and nourish its powers in 
a sympathetic, higher life. Bereft of that which is above 
him, pushed upward as the highest product of the earth, 
the hopes of man perish, his thoughts and affections 
shrink away to that which sustains them. So wither the 
flowers, sinking again into the dust from which they spring. 
The revelation of God in Christ, though it has far less of 
mere authority, fewer actions enjoined and rewards offered 
outside the constitution of the human soul, is more than 
ever permeated with love and the sympathetic impulses of 
a divine fellowship. 

Whatever we may think speculatively of the personal 
element, there has been no religious discipline of any 
moment in the world without it. On the other hand, it 
has been the universal form under which moral truth has 
been applied. It is inseparably interwoven with the 
miraculous in manifestation, and with the supernatural in 
the modification of the minds and hearts of men. 

The doctrine of a personal God is rejected or resisted 
by some for this very reason, that it carries with it mira- 
cles, and more or less of the supernaturalism of current 
Christian sects. Matthew Arnold, as a vigorous represen- 
tative of this feeling, and also as one endowed with fine 
insight and a truly religious spirit, especially invites atten- 
tion. We believe that the underlying connection which 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 379 

gives rise to his aversion to the personal in religion is a 
real one, and that a belief in God prepares the way for the 
supernatural, and imparts its complexion to the New 
Testament. The cohesion of Christian doctrines with 
their fundamental declaration, the personal being of God, 
he thus expresses : " For, granted that there are things 
in a system that are puzzling, yet they belong to a system, 
and it is childish to pick them out by themselves, and 
reproach them with error, when you leave untouched the 
basis of the system where they occur, and indeed admit it 
for sound yourself. . . . Now, with the One Supreme Gov- 
ernor, and miracles, given to start with, it may fairly be 
urged that the construction put by common theology on 
the Bible data, which we call the story of the three Lord 
Shaftesburys, and in which the Atonement fills a promi- 
nent place, is the natural and legitimate construction to 
put on them, and not unscriptural at all."* "Till we are 
agreed as to what we mean by God, we can never, in dis- 
cussing religious questions, understand one another, or 
discuss seriously. ''t "When they — religious people — are 
pressed, they collect themselves all they can, and make a 
great effort, and out they come with this piece of science: 
God is a Personal First Cause, who thinks and loves, the 
moral and intelligent Governor of the universe"% Arnold 
objects to this statement as one not capable of verification. 
"If we announce it we shall be met with the reply, First 
let us verify that there rules a great Personal First Cause, 
who thinks and loves, the moral and intelligent Governor 
of the universe. "§ In place of this statement he would 
put the statement, " There rules an enduring Power not 
ourselves which makes for righteousness. "|| This can be 

* Literature and Dogma, p. 261. f Ibid, p. 270. 

% Ibid, p. 270. § Ibid, p. 267. \ Ibid, p. 267. 



380 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

verified. " How ? why as you verify that fire burns — 
by experience?* 

We doubt both the definiteness of the new statement 
offered by Arnold, and the ease of its verification. What 
does Arnold mean by ' the Eternal Power not ourselves 
that makes for righteousness ' ? It is something which he 
indicates with a capital, and makes equivalent to the 
Eternal, " The Eternal that loveth righteousness"; the 
Eternal, of whom it is said, " Eternal, thou hast been our 
refuge from one generation to another." If we allow no 
halo of personality to play about these words, then are 
they most insufficient and inapplicable ; if we do admit 
this halo, then are they most misleading and confusing. 
They dodge hither and thither, gather all illusion, and 
escape all precision. If matter and material laws are alone 
intended by the Power not ourselves, — and what else can 
of right be indicated — then that Power can cherish no love, 
can offer no spiritual refuge, can be in sympathy with 
nothing, and work for nothing. We could as fitly assert 
that a grist-mill makes for fine flour, or a smelting furnace 
for pig-iron, as affirm that the physical laws of the world 
nourish righteousness, because righteousness prospers under 
them. There is a personal coloring in our words. Let 
us lay aside all glosses of language, all garniture of meta- 
phor, and say that we mean by the Eternal such eternity, 
such love, such refuge as are discoverable in physical facts, 
and no more. If this only is meant by the Eternal, it 
becomes definite, but at the same time, most barren, most 
unable to play the impassioned part assigned it in religious 
life. It is the personal force of its adjuncts, the personify- 
ing character of its attributes, that sustain it under the 
warm, passionate thought of Arnold. 

Nor is the fact so verifiable to the senses that the not- 

* Literature and Dogma, p. 267. 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 38 1 

ourselves, the physical world, makes for righteousness. 
It is easily verifiable to the cultivated moral nature, that, 
under conjoint spiritual and physical laws, under the our- 
selves and the not-ourselves, righteousness does make for 
happiness, and unrighteousness for misery. For this 
proof two things are necessary, however, quickened moral 
intuitions to receive it, vigorous moral forces, permeating 
social life, to make it good, and to enforce it. The Fiji 
think it a measure of wise economy to eat human flesh, 
an act of parental affection to slay an aged parent. They 
regard these customs as possessed of a practical wisdom 
that can be verified. " How ? Why as you verify that 
fire burns, — by experience." Their experience, as inter- 
preted by themselves is quite in conflict with morals. 
This sentiment is to be corrected by a broader perception 
of more purely moral relations, and, as incident thereto, 
and helpful in modifying the make-up of resultant facts, by 
a radical change in public opinion, public approval and 
censure. Polygamy, slavery, many mischievous institu- 
tions, play a part more or less admissible in one stage of 
civilization, and are yet wholly rejected in a subsequent 
one. The verifiable idea has changed ground. It is not 
physical forces alone, or even primarily, that execute moral 
laws, but moral forces, our own constitution quite as much 
as that of the world. The wisdom of these laws is veri- 
fiable, therefore, only to cultivated moral intuitions on 
moral grounds, not to the senses on physical grounds. 
Wisdom is justified of her children, and of them only. 
The thief as a detected thief, regrets the unskillfulness of 
the theft rather than the theft itself. If the theft troubles 
him, it is on superior moral considerations, not on physi- 
cal ones. If the moral nature could itself be shaken off, 
the divine law within us and the social laws which rest on 
it, the fruits of sin would be in many things obscure and 



382 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

unverifiable. The not-ourselves would not make for 
righteousness with its present power and clearness. The 
survival of the fittest would mean the survival of the 
strongest, and the strong would sacrifice the weak with 
the same impunity, the same advantage, that now fall to 
animals. The moral after-clap would disappear. 

That the present aggregate of forces within us and 
without us makes for righteousness we thoroughly believe, 
and also that this concurrent tendency can be shown by 
experience, if that experience is broad, protracted, and 
morally penetrative. But the experience must rest upon 
and be commensurate with the truths it is to disclose. 
Spiritual truths do not shine out under a purely physical 
experience. "Neglect of the Bible is " not "punished 
just as putting one's hand into the fire is punished." * 
If it were, then the fiction should be true that the boat in 
which Sabbath-breakers take their pleasure is especially 
liable to be cast away. A direct reference in this way of 
physical effects to moral causes has justly brought a phase 
of religious instruction into disrepute. From this it follows 
that the moral nature has its own prior basis, and can not 
verify its authority by simply physical events. 

The just live by faith, not without faith ; by a spiritual 
experience, not by a social and physical one. We are to 
love God whom we have not seen. It is the whole pur- 
pose of our moral training to give weight to purely moral, 
that is, to invisible, intangible forces. Arnold usually 
recognizes this, for he makes it the secret of Christ, on 
which he lays so much stress, that he holds the outer life 
under the rule of the inner life. He that loveth his life 
shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall 
keep it unto life eternal. Whosoever would come after 
me, let him renounce himself, and take up his cross daily 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 274. 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 383 

and follow me. Is it not inconsistent to expect a secret 
of this nature to verify itself except to those who have 
already accepted it, and pursued it ? But a verification 
of this sort can not play the part of antecedent proof 
otherwise than as testimony ; and must then be addressed 
to a faith that quite transcends merely physical experience. 
This fundamental principle, an Eternal, a not-ourselves 
that makes for righteousness, demands, then, precisely the 
same form of verification as the proposition it displaces, a 
personal God who loves righteousness. This last state- 
ment has found a complete verification in the spiritual 
experience of many thousands, and if a higher ethical 
experience is good as proof of the one proposition, it should 
equally be of the other. It is the habitual claim of those 
who repose in a personal being as the Ruler of the world, 
that it is a faith commended by the experience which 
arises under it, that the more thoroughly the belief is 
entertained and the life shaped by it, the deeper is the 
confirmation of its hourly fruits. This too is a faith that 
in its ministration to spiritual life, in the inner experience 
of the soul, " can prove itself, if it is so, and will prove itself, 
because it is so." These conclusions of the believer are 
just unless we affirm that a physical experience alone 
verifies any thing, that an ethical experience confirms 
nothing except the state of mind that entertains it. But 
if this assertion be granted, all verification of moral prin- 
ciples drops away ; for sensations as sensations can not 
establish them. Their proof is not in the sensation but in 
our rendering of it, that is in the moral conditions by 
which we surround it and interpret it. The capsizing of 
a boat on the Sabbath does not directly confirm a moral 
precept. It is, therefore, the moral state of each individual 
that must define and measure for him his verification. 



384 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

The Fiji will make the Fiji's rendering, and likely enough 
verify cannibalism and parricide. 

Nor need we be distressed by the thought, that our 
" God is a magnified and unnatural man." Better that he 
should be this than less than this. None of us escape 
our shadows unless we withdraw altogether into the dark- 
ness. It is to withdraw into the darkness, to deny thought 
and love to God, lest we should liken him to man ; to 
retreat into the impersonal as a refuge from the personal ; 
to turn and go backward lest we should fail to go suffi- 
ciently far forward. If our formula of thought concerning 
God is, This and more, then we put without danger into 
the this the highest our thoughts attain to. 

That the conception of God which fell to Israel was in 
advance of that which falls to us, as Arnold seems to think, 
is both without proof and extremely improbable. Our 
movement has not been, as such a supposition indicates, 
backward. Earlier ages are characterized by a more 
restricted not by a less restricted notion of Deity. Per- 
sonality does not necessarily belittle that to which it is 
applied. Its limitations are not restrictions but powers, 
capacities, sensibilities, grander conditions and forms cf 
being. All creation, all endowment, is definition, separa- 
tion, in this sense limitation. We misapply personality in 
its relation to God only when we insist on some given 
form of it, on the narrowness incident to human intelligence 
as essential to intelligence itself. Says Arnold, "All 
Israel's language about this power, except that it makes 
for righteousness, is approximate language, the language 
of poetry and eloquence, thrown out at a vast object of 
our consciousness, not fully apprehended by it, but extend- 
ing infinitely beyond it."* Why should Arnold make the 
exception that he does ? The words, it makes for right- 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 267. 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 385 

eousness, are not so supremely definite and exhaustive as 
to call for their exclusion from partial, perplexed, poetic 
statements. What does the it refer to ? What is covered 
by the words make for ? and what is righteousness ? By 
the time we have fully answered these questions, we shall 
find, that there is no more a uniform and sufficient idea 
back of them than there is of the other words by which we 
express God's government ; we shall find that being moral, 
personal words, they carry with them the entire moral, per- 
sonal problem. 

This conception of the tendency of God's government, 
that it makes for righteousness, which belonged so clearly 
to Israel, accompanied conceptions of the most anthro- 
popathic character. No one can read the narrative of the 
dealings of the Lord with Abraham, or with Moses, with- 
out discovering not merely the presence of the personal 
element, but its presence under a very narrow form. " And 
Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, 
why the bush is not burned. And when the Lord saw 
that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the 
midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses."* 

When we speak of God as a personal being, our Ian? 
guage is no more to be construed in a scientific and exact 
way than are the words of Arnold, when he says, The 
Eternal, that makes for righteousness. They are more 
inclusive, but no more final, no nearer a mathematical 
formula. They rest on precisely the same laws of lan- 
guage and of thought, the excellent and inescapable law 
that our words point toward, but . never compass, our 
highest ideas. Indeed Arnold seems especially faulty at 
this point in priding himself on the verifiable character of 
his favorite phrase as being one of which the senses and 
daily experience can make something. Its excellence is 

* Ex. iii, 3, 4. 



386 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

quite other than this. Are we not with Israel more poetic 
and eloquent, and by so much more correct, throwing out 
our words at a vast object of consciousness, when we say, 
God includes personal attributes, wisdom and grace, that 
he so creates and combines all things that in their make- 
up they hold his rational purposes ; more wise than if we 
were to content ourselves with the bald words, the not- 
ourselves that makes for righteousness, under the delusive 
idea that we had now an initial scientific truth ? We insist 
on the right of every mind to use the largest words, the 
deepest conceptions, as the symbolic characters under 
which it approaches Deity ; as the glowing outline of the 
cloud that veils for it the Sun of Righteousness. We are 
not always wisest when we say the least unless this least 
inwraps, and is intended to inwrap, the most, as the hidden 
core of its being. He is better than it; the righteous ruler 
than the not-ourselves, because they suggest more, are 
more poetic, are thrown out more boldly, more believingly, 
toward that one supreme conception which is ever entering 
ever eluding our thoughts, inviting our love and instantly 
enlarging it. Arnold derides. the definiteness of Protestant 
statements, and falls into the same error in commending 
his own statement as one capable of direct verification. 
Verifiableness is barrenness, let us take the broader 
thought, looking to the larger experience, and gathering 
its convictions along the high, far-reaching paths of our 
being. That statement of the Divine Life is best which 
includes the most, excludes the least; which starts in the 
clear, strong light, and fades out as this fades out under 
failing vision. Personality is only a starting point, and the 
best starting point, because it is nearest to us, and con- 
tains for us infinitely more than any other. Arnold errs 
in striving to verify a truth on a plane lower than its own, 
in looking upon personality as a narrow and narrowing 



PRIMITIVE FACTS. 387 

idea, and in striving to check the soul, flowing forth under 
its own impulses and with its own imagery toward God. 

It is not easy to understand why Arnold should be dis- 
turbed by a liability to disagreements in opinion. Taking 
a position quite his own, he should readily accept discrep- 
ancies. He should hardly expect a speedy admission of 
his own divergent conclusions, verified though they may 
be to his mind by an experience as plain as that fire burns. 
He rejects a belief in a personal Ruler, because, "once 
launched on this line of hypothesis and inference, with a 
Supreme Governor assumed, and the task thrown upon us 
of making out what he means us to infer, and what we may 
suppose him to do and to intend, one of us may infer one 
thing and another of us another, and neither of us can 
possibly prove himself to be right or his adversary to be 
wrong."* The idea of quelling this discord by a new 
dogma is ludicrous. Contentions of this kind we pass 
through, we do not retreat from them. The most definite 
truths are those which morally do the least for us. Math- 
ematical truths are demonstrable, yet they have the least 
emotional character, and lie farthest from conduct. It 
would be well if we could look upon phases of belief, belief 
pertaining to the higher themes, as more individual, more 
peculiar to our personal experience and passing insight ; 
as the intellectual incidents of our progress which do not 
so much express the permanent nature of truth, as our 
immediate relations to it, the present angle of our vision ; 
and so living by these phases of life, could pass through 
them to conceptions better and broader than they. Why 
should we return, to the baldest and poorest statement of 
doctrine as our condition of unity? Why go backward 
to reach a point of convergence, when our first duty would 
be to forsake it? Let us rejoice in a diversity which indi- 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 263. 



388 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

cates divergent and growing experiences, and enables us 
lo render to others the more efficient aid by seeing what 
they fail to see. We can do much for each other, if we 
freely leave to each his own insight, his own experiences, 
his own conclusions, bringing our convictions as farther 
contributions to a growth which prospers only as its order 
of procedure and internal development are rigorously 
regarded. If we are always s looking about " for plain 
experimental proof, such as that fire burns," we shall 
dwarf our spiritual natures, and narrow down our opinions 
to rudiments, that are not even used as rudiments, of 
thought. 

Arnold would push aside a belief in a personal God as 
sure to lead to many and conflicting conclusions. These 
parasites of faith are to be exterminated, and exterminated 
by destroying the parent life. On such conditions we may 
as well let them live, for the worst they themselves can do 
is to undo the life that nourishes them. The mastery of the 
superior organization, the superior impulse, the superior 
faith is what we should covet, for this will hold in check 
the things that prey upon it. Discrepancies of doctrine 
are best removed by that growth which leaves them behind, 
as the tree sheds the leaves of a previous cycle. With 
our unverifiable ideas, our conclusions beyond the range 
of experience, our conflict of opinions, we shall, growing 
in spiritual life, be able to do all that Arnold hopes to do 
by a construction of thought so superior, as he thinks, in 
definiteness and experimental proof. "The great thing, 
as we believe, in favor of such a construction as we put 
upon the Bible is, that experience, as it increases, con- 
stantly confirms it, and that though it can not command 
assent, it will be found to win assent more and more."* 

Wherever we go, how far soever we retreat, we must 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 278. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 389 

still take our ground, and win the thoughts of men to it. 
It is the personal in man that is developed by religion, to 
this that government falls. But the personal is best won 
by the personal, by conquering sympathies drawing the 
heart toward them. Faith looks for a victory of the per- 
sonal over the impersonal, the spiritual over the physical, 
in the world about us akin to that which is taking place 
within us. Thus is the harmony restored ; seeking first 
the kingdom of God and his righteousness, we find all 
things added unto us. The order is not these things and 
then righteousness, but righteousness and so the things it 
orders. The impersonal is not to grade down the per- 
sonal, but the personal is to suffuse and take up the imper- 
sonal. The law of righteousness makes its way by ruling 
itself into the physical world. The physical world does not 
issue in it ; it gathers in and includes all, as the ruler of 
all. Righteousness is alien to matter, it is sovereign in 
mind. Righteousness can be lodged only in One, righteous, 
and go forth from him. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



Constructive Facts. Trinity. Christ. His Divinity. His 
Work. Holy Spirit. Sa?ictification. The Church. 

THE revelation of God in Christ is the great con- 
structive fact in Christianity. The incarnation 
granted, it becomes the heart of the faith, denning its 
spirit and power. Incidental to this revelation, a tribute 
to its magnitude, comes that of the trinity. This doc- 
trine, if present at all in the Old Testament, is there in so 
obscure a form as to show no working power. The pres- 



39° A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ence of Christ on the earth and his divinity are the new 
facts which strike backward into the character of God, and 
bring to it, in many directions, new disclosures. The 
divinity of Christ and the trinity of the Godhead are in- 
separable doctrines, and the assertion of the first gives 
immediate occasion for the second. Nor does the Scrip- 
tural declaration of the doctrine of the trinity seem to have 
passed beyond, in explanation and precision of statement, 
what is necessarily involved in the finite being, yet divine 
attributes, of Christ. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is 
subordinate to this of the divinity of our Lord, and a 
secondary out-flow from it. 

If Christ was God, if he included directly a divine life, 
then evidently, as one finite, on another side of his being, — 
as a man, he failed to completely inclose, or perfectly dis- 
close, the divine nature. So to look upon him under his 
limitations, straitened and hedged about by the close 
bounds of a human life, would be to disguise and cripple 
the Divinity set forth. , Every proposition concerning 
God, every statement of his nature, must be supplemented 
by the words, This and more ; equally was this true 
of the incarnation in Christ. The finite was no more 
sufficient here than elsewhere for the Infinite. Infinite 
wisdom, power and love were pressing up to the point of 
disclosure, yet but a portion of them were actually uttered, 
and a yet smaller portion actually apprehended by any 
recipient. Hence that given must always bear with it as a 
leading fact the suggestion of that withheld. The infinite 
character of the series must be indicated in the statement 
of its first terms. How repressing are the restraints put 
upon Christ by the incarnation, so much so as frequently 
to lead the philosophic mind to exclaim, This can not be ; 
God and man are terms incompatible, and a God-man is 
no God ! Quiet our thoughts as we will, remember as we 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 39I 

may. that every revelation of God in words or in works is, 
as a restriction, beset with the same difficulty ; that the 
soul and life of man are the broadest and most transparent 
medium possible between us and Heaven, and we must 
still feel, that this wisdom and love of Christ, if most real 
and divine, are, in reference to the depths of being in the 
Almighty, as the simple fountain that flows out at the foot 
of far-reaching, inaccessible and inscrutable summits. 
Christ is always the Son of God, begotten then and there 
out of the strength of God, that he may always have back 
of him to the irreverent, hasty, shallow thoughts of men, 
the Father, the inexhaustible resources of the Divine 
nature. A revelation of any kind, more especially of this 
kind, which gathered itself up in a rounded, complete, 
independent person, calls instantly for a fresh assertion 
of the Infinite as its background, that it may stand forth 
a simple bas-relief, a thing of suggestions and not of 
exhaustive statements. The truth must be, as it were, at 
once given and taken back again, lest men be misled by 
its apparent narrowness. 

The doctrine of the trinity found this occasion for its 
incidental, inevitable utterance, and unites itself to the 
divinity of Christ — so limited, simple, explicit in its form — 
to give the thoughts extension, reverence, worship again, 
and throw them back once more fully, fairly on to the mys- 
terious, the infinite, the unfathomable. Thus the mind 
receives aid, and is at the same time withheld from its 
worst error in supposing this to be all. Such seems to us 
the ground, the occasion of the new doctrine of the trinity. 
It was a reassertion of the Infinite as against the finite, a 
fresh planting of the Almightiness of Heaven back of each 
and every revelation, a reemphasizing of Divinity^ that 
Christ might declare the Divine. The doctrine is present, 
not as a new interior revelation of the Divine Being, but as 



39 2 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

an instrumental truth, a quasi truth, to help us in the 
grasp of other truths. We believe, therefore, that this 
doctrine, held in explicit formula, is often used for precisely 
the opposite purpose for which it was declared. 

This article of our faith, in its formal statement, has 
been frequently pushed much beyond its Scriptural basis 
and practical service, and been formulated in words quite 
too rigid, and wholly at war with the mystery, the depth, 
the unsearchableness of the Divine which it helps to keep 
alive, which it was intended to keep alive, by rescuing it 
from too close a construction in Christ. Great but fruit- 
less subtilty has issued, on this subject of the trinity, in 
rigid and exact dogma at a point at which exactness is 
impossible, and rigidity inadmissible. "In the unity of 
the Go.dhead there be three persons of one substance, 
power and eternity ; God the Father, God the Son, and 
God the Holy Ghost. The Father is of none, neither 
begotten nor proceeding ; the Son is eternally begotten of 
the Father ; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the 
Father and the Son." So runs the Westminster Confes- 
sion. In this statement, in many before it and in many 
since with which it stands affiliated, two points are clearly 
put forth, first, one substance and three persons ; second, 
the genetic dependence of the three, the Son eternally 
begotten, the Holy Spirit eternally proceeding. The 
second half of the dogma has relatively lost hold on the 
Christian mind ; the first retains its sharp, familiar outline. 
Against them both there hold decisive objections. 

They treat a subject incapable of exact knowledge as 
if it were capable of such knowledge, and thus issue in a 
deceitful wisdom of words. One substance and three per- 
sons as a formal definition conveys an incongruous idea ; 
its two members united in one assertion can only properly 
make one of two impressions. They may be looked on as 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 393 

a contradictory formula, designed to stand as the symbol 
of mystery ; or as a proposition whose terms are employed 
in a meaning quite aside from their ordinary use. On the 
first supposition, our precise dogma distills back again 
into mist, and it would have been better to have fallen on 
some less deceptive, some more changeable, intelligible 
mode of expressing our sense of mystery and indetermin- 
ateness ; or, on the second supposition, the entire work 
of definition still remains to be performed, and we must 
show in what sense the word person is used, distinguishing 
it from substance. In uniting in one statement three 
persons and one substance we have, then, done nothing 
clearly, since we are not content to have our words 
regarded as the symbol of the unintelligible ; nor are we 
prepared to show in what sense they can be used so as to 
drop into an explicit, intelligible idea. We are then play- 
ing off upon ourselves a delusive verbal proposition as a 
fundamental truth, and insisting, perhaps, that others shall 
use it in a similar way. The words, one substance and 
three persons, as applied to spiritual beings, in whom per- 
sonality and substantiality look to the same qualities, no 
more coalesce by their own import than do the words, 
white and black, right and wrong. All that we take out 
of our conception of substance wherewith to make that of 
the independent persons impoverishes the former, and all 
that we reserve for the substance of Godhead as against 
its persons famishes the latter. Nor do the comparisons 
which we bring forward to give distinctness to our thoughts 
do more than furnish a shadowy, vague footing. Many 
things are triple in one aspect and one in another, but 
none of them cover the case, as we are compelled freely to 
acknowledge. No analogies help us, because they all miss 
the point of mystery. We can not, having presented our 
illustration, say, Our trinity is like this ; the sun, its beams, 
17* 



394 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

and the scintillations of those beams, this is our analogue. 
We are compelled rather to say, This does not touch the 
root of the matter • and if we are wise we shall be ready 
to say, The mystery remains unbroken, let us not cut our- 
selves off from its hearty acceptance by any more efforts 
at explanation. Having given our faith a formula, we 
retreat with an indifferent grace to the unknown. Per- 
sonality and substantiality inhere in one point ; neither can 
be passed off as a group of attributes, as a transient mode 
of being, as a phase of activity ; therefore, under ordinary 
speech nothing more than a mystery, indicated by a con- 
tradiction of language, can belong to our phrase, three per- 
sons in one substance. Unwilling to leave this article of 
faith unexplained, as one whose data has not been given 
with sufficient distinctness for a formula, we may be led 
to claim for it intuitive vision, a power to penetrate the 
meaning of words otherwise inexplicable. This we do 
when we call God the Infinite. We reject exposition, and 
cast ourselves back on direct insight. Evidently the doc- 
trine of the trinity involves no such primitive intuition of 
the soul ; it is not a necessity of thought, and is amenable 
to an ordinary logical process. 

Certainly contradictions can, as contradictions, present 
no claims for acceptance. The fundamental axiom of 
affirmation is that of identity of terms. To fall away from 
this is utterly to subvert reason. Nor can we urge that a 
seeming contradiction may none the less cover a great 
and consistent truth. The mind, in dealing with proposi- 
tions, must do so under its own conception of them ; that 
is what to it they stand for. We are not to accept as a 
truth what seems to us to be a contradiction, on the ground 
that something else, not seen by us in the statement, may 
be true. When that phase of thought shall be presented 
it will be time enough to decide upon it, and the first 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 395 

result will be to cast out, as a contradiction, what the mind 
has previously held, or pretended to hold. No intellec- 
tual health, no spiritual good, can be reached by retaining 
contradictions, by subverting reason at the outset. We may 
accept things whose conditions we do not understand, but 
so far as an assertion presents contradictory elements, it is 
self-destructive ; so far as it represents irreconcilable 
elements, it is unintelligible. The mind ought not to play 
hide-and-seek with itself, or to suppose that there is some 
absolute truth back of words, though the words are failing 
to convey it. What the mind deals with is that proximate 
to it, the apparent force of the words ; if there is a contra- 
diction, the proposition is logically annihilated. To treat 
it as true is intellectual dishonesty. Any illustration offered 
of things that are, though they do not seem to us to be, 
possible, affords no relief: for the fact, whatever it is, 
when once understood, subverts immediately, as false, 
our previous conception of it. 

We are at a loss how to characterize these explicit 
doctrinal statements of the trinity, which have belonged 
to Christian theology since the Nicene council. They are 
not popular, for they have none of the flexibility of popular 
speech ; they are not merely suggestive, figurative, but 
are used as definitive and final. Nor can we recognize 
them as truly philosophical propositions. They lack the 
clearness, the defining force of the conceptions of true 
science. The theme, the interior nature of God ; the data 
we hold concerning it, the implication of passages of Scrip- 
ture that have another purpose than instruction on this 
point ; and the scope of human powers, unable to penetrate 
the mystery of their own activity even, forbid this field to 
us as one too remote and difficult for exact knowledge. 

What then are these statements but a pseudo-science, 
which misleads us with the appearance of knowledge with- 



396 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

out its substance. One of the most essential conditions 
of wise inquiry, of real and sufficient investigation, is a 
determination of the limits of knowledge, what things may 
be known, and under what form they may be known. To 
cut off the unknowable from futile and confusing effort is 
even more a gain to theology than to science, since per- 
plexity and obscurity are more native to the one region 
than to the other. We object, then, to these exact for- 
mulae of the trinity as presumptuous and misleading in 
reference to ourselves, and most unauthorized and tyran- 
nical in reference to others, when urged on their faith. 
They attempt what is impossible, cover up failure, and 
offer barren words to unenlightened minds as divine truth. 
They may have subserved the single good purpose of 
occupying the ground against bewildering discussion, and 
more unendurable assertion. If these objections hold 
against the phrase, One substance and three persons, much 
more do they hold against the eternal generation of the 
Son and procession of the Spirit. If the ideas of person- 
ality and substance, as illustrated by our experience, refuse 
to be combined into a possible trinity, still less will gen- 
eration and procession, interpreted in a like way, carry us 
forward in a satisfactory exposition of the interior depend- 
encies of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Remote images and 
misleading words, if used authoritatively, are worse than 
no words and no images. The eternal generation and 
eternal procession of distinct persons from each other is a 
piece of logodaedaly in which the performers are most of 
all deceived. Nothing in human experience casts a glim- 
mer of light upon the language. To give currency to such 
ideas, we must consent to forego ordinary inquiry, and 
assert intuitive processes of an unusual kind. Such truths 
are not only supernatural in their revelation, they require 
supernatural gifts for their apprehension. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 397 

However admissible this dogmatic method might be, 
if we were content to attach a variable, shadowy, suggestive 
force to our language, it becomes wholly mischievous when 
we claim for it an exact, positive value. We offer as an 
example of the degree in which this has been done the 
Symbolum Quicunque, a leading and genetic term in the 
series of doctrinal statements. These are a portion of its 
assertions, i. " Whoever would be saved must first of all 
take care that he hold the catholic faith, 2. Which except a 
man preserve whole and inviolate, he shall without doubt 
perish eternally. 3. But this is the catholic faith, that we 
worship God in trinity, and trinity in unity, 4. Neither con- 
founding the persons nor dividing the substance. . . 

20. The Father is made by none nor created nor begotten, 

21. The Son is from the Father alone, not made, not 
created, but begotten, 22. The Holy Spirit is not created 

.by the Father and Son, nor begotten, but proceeds."* 
Christian love is not more sinned against in these proposi- 
tions than is common sense ; and neither is often dealt 
with more harshly. 

We have objected to these formulae of the trinity as 
wearing a wholly deceptive appearance of knowledge ; this 
objection passes into the farther objection, that these for- 
mulae are liable to be regarded, as at bottom they are, self- 
contradictory, and so to burden and perplex individual 
consciences, and to issue in unbelief. In ordinary lan- 
guage personality pervades and gathers up in one simple 
being the substantial qualities of manhood ; it is referable 
to their combination in a single living soul ; to separate, 
therefore, personality from substance, with no new defini- 
tion of words, is to confound the thoughts. But these 
new meanings are not hinted at in the formulae themselves, 
nor can they be entered on without opening afresh the 

* Prof. Shedd's His. of Doctrines, vol. i, p. 352. 



39^ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

whole problem, and disclosing the deceptive character of 
its solution. Hence honest, clear minds are distressed by 
this clinging to words which carry with them a contradic- 
tion, and find either the cardinal doctrine of the unity of 
God put in jeopardy, or a necessity laid upon them of 
casting away, as a verbal trick, any doctrine of the trinity. 
A positive denial, displacing an absurdity, thus takes the 
place of a waiting attitude ; and the earnest mind retreats 
at once to the tenable, safe position of unity. Its creed 
becomes, There is one only God, as against the assertion, 
There are Gods three and one ; or an assertion which to it 
bears this appearance. 

A third objection to these dogmatical statements is, 
that having no other basis than the Scriptures, they entirely 
transcend them, and so issue in a sense of perversion and 
misuse. If the language of the Bible can be treated as 
exact, and subjected to logical inferences, then indeed 
some foundation can be found for these formulae, though 
hardly a sufficient one. But to do this is plainly to turn 
Revelation from its purpose. The doctrine of the trinity 
is introduced indirectly, in figurative language, as a means 
of relieving the too rigid limits of thought, which would 
otherwise accompany the incarnation of Christ, and the 
manifestation of the Holy Spirit. It is an instrumental, 
a modal, doctrine, rather than a substantial one, as used 
and presented in the Bible. There is no effort made to 
disclose any thing absolutely concerning the divine con- 
stitution, but, Christ appearing, his connection with God is 
kept alive and softened by the figure of sonship. Used 
suggestively, figuratively, the words, Father and Son, 
accomplish the entire purpose for which they were intro 
duced, and we hold fast to Christ as at once human and 
divine, as an incomplete revelation, yet one that truly 
unites us to the fullness of God, a fullness we express by 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 399 

such words as the Godhead, the Father. If, however, we 
submit such words as these to the logical faculty as suffi- 
cient data for all the conclusions that can be extorted from 
them ; if we make of them a direct, substantial disclosure 
of the nature of God, we may well enough reach the unin- 
telligible doctrines of procession, generation, one sub- 
stance and three persons, words of make-believe knowl- 
edge. Some statements do their work by casting around 
our too exact thoughts, our too well-defined images, a 
vague, vanishing outline, a sense of inadequacy and inex- 
haustibleness. This must always be true of those state- 
ments which accompany any fresh revelation of God. The 
line of mystery is drawn at a new boundary. While clear 
light is given at one point it quickly fades into darkness 
at others. The infinite spaces are opened up, but not 
pierced by sunbeams. The great revelation made in 
Christ called for such a readjustment, held the doctrine of 
the trinity as its poise and counterpart of mystery ; and 
this doctrine is to be taken as the foil of that great fact, 
and the kindred fact, the coming of the Spirit. God's 
working and life drop apart, as it were, that we may take a 
portion and leave a portion, and be equally consoled and 
instructed by both. Laying hold of this doctrine other- 
wise, making of it an independent, explicit fact, we turn 
the instrumental into the substantial, the figurative into 
the literal • we find in revelation a new riddle, and in the 
riddle new absurdities and contradictions. Language is 
often a light to see other things by, where it will not allow 
itself to be scrutinized as an independent fact. If,ceasing 
to see by it, we turn sharp upon it, challenge it, and com- 
pel it to yield its watchword, it may mock and illude us 
like a spectre. 

The effect is most unfortunate on our reverence, our 
sense of a wise and sufficient way, and our skill in walking 



400 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

in it, when we put the Scriptures to the rack, and compel 
them to testify to indirections. To such violence the proverb 
of Solomon is applicable, The wringing of the nose bringeth 
forth blood. 

The personal pronouns are freely applied to the Father, 
Son and Holy Spirit, yet as we instantly assent to the fact 
that these pronouns do imply, and must imply, in this con- 
nection, less than they do in their ordinary use, we are 
quite afloat ; we have no measure in our hand by which to 
determine the distance of departure. To construct a con- 
tradiction out of this relaxed yet living language, and 
impose it as revealed truth on our thoughts, is putting the 
Scriptures to the worst of purposes ; is turning them aside 
from their untrammeled, divine service, and establishing 
in its place a detestable tyranny. The sonship of Christ 
is something other than the sonship of man, the personality 
of Christ in its relation to God than the personality which 
divides us one from another, and the effort to settle with- 
out data the limits of this diversity, while diverting us 
from the productive use of the truth, is itself the most 
unremunerative labor. Such speculation belongs to the 
class of speculations which bewitch the mind by their 
ingenuity, yet are like spiders' webs, invisible in most lights 
and at best holding only insects. How simple a thing it 
is to sit at the feet of the Master, how difficult a thing to 
take up and treat his inner being and invisible, divine 
dependencies as a psychological problem ! Was it in the 
first or the last activity that the Scriptures were shaped to 
help us? 

The divinity of Christ was the substantial truth which 
gave occasion to the formal one of the trinity, and to this 
we turn. We understand by it a direct union of the divine, 
the human nature in Christ, in such a way that we are put 
by him in immediate communion with God. The condi- 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 40I 

tions of this union, by which human restrictions are partially 
obliterated by the divine fullness, and the divine powers 
are measurably straitened by human limitations, are strange 
and undefinable, but scarcely more so than any supernat- 
ural revelation whatsoever of God. Evidently the life of 
man, physical and spiritual, is, of all media and all material 
manifestations, the best fitted to be a permanent, coherent 
and intelligible revelation of the Divine Being. If we 
believe that his Spirit touches the physical world at all to 
infuse it with his own power, and to make it overflow with 
an immediate and sensible presence, no more sober, 
proportionate and instructive instrumentality offers itself 
to such a service than the rational nature of man. This 
summit most easily receives and carries the electric light. 
As far as mystery is concerned our choice must lie between 
the God-man, Christ Jesus, and the man, Jesus. No 
intermediate ground abates in the least the incomprehen- 
sible in the facts, while it is burdened with peculiar diffi- 
culties, as something inadequate, partial, superfluous. 
How any independent, superior, spiritual life should unite 
itself to human nature involves the entire mystery of the 
incarnation, while, if that life was below the Divine Life, 
the reasons, the hopes and incentives, of the incarnation 
largely disappear. The mystery of God in Christ, great 
as it is, is not different in kind from the other mysteries 
of our faith, or those which gather close about our own 
spiritual existence. Every man's life is an incarnation. 
The body is to the spirit, on the one side, a restriction, a 
series of limitations, and, on the other, an instrument, a 
revelation, the indispensable ground of a visible life. The 
inexplicable interplay of mind and body along a line at 
which two most distinct realms meet and modify each other, 
and mutually give strange powers to each other, is a direct, 
formal type of that which we assert in the divinity of 



402 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Christ. In him a still higher life bends to these narrow, 
barren conditions, and they in turn disclose the pressure 
of great powers, and become proportionately flexible under 
them, flexible to the point in which to bend farther would 
be to break, and so to waste the conditions of the labor. 
So, too, if we believe in a union of our lives with the life 
of God through his Holy Spirit, we assent to a union sug- 
gestive of that in Christ, and transpiring under the same 
undeniable conditions. If we believe in our own spiritual 
life, and the spiritual life of God, we are one-with him, and 
are prepared for variable conditions of intercourse. The 
disclosure of the greater to the less, the less taken up on 
terms of communion and instruction by the greater, these 
are the normal facts that flow from the spiritual premises, 
and are, with all their mysteries, plainer than the premises 
would be without them. God undisclosed, the human 
spirit unvivified by his life, these would be the truly start- 
ling and confounding facts, facts so destructive as to quench 
the light of the spiritual world, and subvert its foundations 
of faith. 

We turn first to the Scriptures as offering the direct 
proofs of the divine nature of Christ. This truth is so 
wrought into them, reappears so often as a direct, primary 
purpose, that for us they lose coherence without it. So 
many are the passages which affirm or involve the divinity 
of Christ, that doubt would hardly have arisen on this sub- 
ject among those who accept the authority of the Scrip- 
tures, were it not for certain other passages which seem as 
directly to declare his subordination to the Father. We 
have, therefore, to look for reconciliation between asser- 
tions seemingly contradictory. One of the two classes of " 
statements must so far bend to the other as to remove con- 
tradictions, and unite with it in working toward one con- 
clusion. In an apparent conflict of this character, those 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 403 

passages should have the precedence in thought which 
return the most constantly, under the greatest variety of 
connections; while any in frequency or restriction of use 
should suggest freely a corresponding restriction of pur- 
pose. The passages on which the divinity of Christ rests 
are sown broadcast through the entire Word of God ; are 
direct and indirect, and infinitely varied in application, 
while those which assert his subjection to the Father are 
few, spoken by himself under the immediate impression 
which his limited incarnate form was producing, and were 
fitted, as it seems to us, to expound and correct this nar- 
rowing relation. For this reason he brings to view the 
doctrine of the undisclosed Godhead, the Father, greater 
than he. How easily were the blind thoughts of men 
ready to stumble over these feeble, sensible facts, far more 
cogent in their visible restrictions than the spiritual powers 
of Christ in their invisible might, and to measure him on 
his narrow and more transient side, instead of his broader 
and more real one ! Hence, under the assertion of the 
Father, and his superior and undefinable glory, Christ 
was constantly putting back of himself those hidden and 
undisclosed things of God with which it was his mission to 
bring the human mind in contact. Light, great light, yet 
how inferior as it actually reaches the eyes, the minds and 
hearts of men, to the light which abides in God ! This 
reversion of Christ to the Father was fitted to keep alive 
in his disciples a sense of infinite and hidden things, while 
revealing to them those bright flashes of truth cast outward 
and earthward in himself. He gave and withheld, he 
defined and reduced his too exact definition with the same 
stroke. 

There are thus two most sufficient reasons for these 
words of occasional disparagement on the lips of Christ. 
They are in direct recognition of the darkness, the eclipse 



404 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

of faculties, in the incarnation ; and they serve to turn the 
eyes of his disciples beyond the sensible, visible Christ up 
to the invisible God whom he seeks to disclose. So cau- 
tioned, -so impressed, his followers could not fail to look 
more deeply into his nature than they would have done if 
left at once to narrow it down to the dimensions it pre- 
sented to their comparatively blind eyes. It is, then, no 
arbitrary relation between contradictory texts that leads 
us to hold fast to the divinity of Christ. The conflicting 
words seem to us to spring directly from a qualified pur- 
pose, from an effort to lift the mind up again, too content 
to tarry in the narrow and literal, to the inscrutable and 
the Divine. They give the background of darkness from 
which every revelation of the Infinite must stand forth. 

A second principle of sound interpretation, when one 
portion of a message is to be construed in subordination 
to another, is, that those assertions in themselves most 
weighty should carry their full force. It can not be doubt- 
ful in this case which these are, nor to what conclusion 
this principle will lead us. Those passages which affirm 
the divinity of Christ, " In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God and the Word was God," "He 
who hath seen me hath seen the Father," can have but one 
rendering weighty enough fully to meet the language. No 
statements strike deeper than these assertions. There is 
no opportunity for hints and half-way meanings. The 
bold import of the words must be met or the divine mes- 
sage falls infinitely below its ostensible force and drift. 
Here to be less than exact is to be profane and false, and 
that in a most deceptive, unkind way. Words, divine 
words, of encouragement and consolation cannot so fall 
off from their high stretch, and apparent purpose, and pre- 
serve even ordinary integrity. So debased a currency can 
not come from the king's mint. How instinctively will 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 405 

the honest, sincere mind draw back its language from over- 
statement, excessive coloring, inadmissible hints ; and 
above all in stating its own claims ! The texts which 
carry with them the divinity of Christ must sweep straight 
to their mark, or the moral integrity of the Scriptures is 
lost. The positive, leading, enlivening assertion must 
remain sound through and through, whatever strain is put 
upon detached words of curtailment and limitation. The 
truth and the love of Heaven are both involved in this 
principle. Because the thing asserted in the divinity of 
Christ is so great, so momentous, so blessed, we argue 
that it is the true thing, the divine mind. If not, how 
great should have been the reserve in approaching it, with 
how many barriers of denial would the Scripture, would 
Christ, have held us back from supposing it. There is no 
parity of importance between the. two classes of texts. The 
second class have hardly any significance except as it is 
given them by the truthfulness of the first class. The 
entire weight of both classes turns on the assertion of 
divinity. 

But this leads us to a third principle. That exegesis 
of apparently conflicting passages is the best which gives 
them both a sufficient meaning. The texts which state 
or imply the divinity of Christ can find no adequate, or 
proximately adequate, meaning short of that which seems 
to be involved in the words themselves. Any meaning 
below this falls totally off from the truth, and that on the 
most dangerous side. Not to be divine is to be something 
infinitely less than divine ; and to claim divinity without 
possession is the blindest fanaticism or the boldest pro- 
fanity. Those words on the other hand which Christ uses 
concerning himself, the son of man, perform a sufficient 
service in lifting the thoughts of his disciples by contrast 
from the visible to the Invisible, to the mysteries of the 



406 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Godhead, and are sufficiently exact in drawing attention to 
the dependence of the relationship involved in the Revealed 
and the Unrevealed. Indeed, unless these words of Christ 
are united to those other words which assert his divinity, 
they become the merest truism, impertinent, inapt to their 
own occasion or to any occasion. They must spring up 
either with this doctrine of divinity, or in direct refutation 
of it falsely made current ; or be convicted of imbecility 
and superfluity. Our alternative is made up of the first 
and the last supposition. There is not in them that clear, 
reiterated denial which would belong to the second pur- 
pose ; nor was any divinity ascribed to Christ aside from 
his own words and the words of his disciples. These pas- 
sages, therefore, have no sufficient object except as they 
rest back on the first class of assertions, and imply their 
truth. Only thus are they held aloof from weakness and 
absurdity. Put them in the mouth of John or of Paul, and 
their assumption and folly are at once evident. These 
three principles, then, unite in leading us to one conclu- 
sion. The assertions most general, the assertions most 
weighty, carry with them their full force, and both series 
unite, by the subordination instituted, in harmonious and 
sufficient meanings. 

The divinity of Christ is also deeply and indirectly 
wrought into the Scriptures by the attitude he takes, and 
the objects he proposes. He exercises divine power, he 
accepts worship, he draws the hearts of men to himself, he 
steps forth to rule nature and man, he identifies himself 
with the Father. No greater spiritual injury can be inflicted 
than to mislead the soul in its search after God, or in any 
way to get between it and God. The character of God 
and our direct relations to him are the cardinal truths of 
religion, and will not suffer perversion or concealment. 
No mere servant of God can do otherwise than to point 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 407 

distinctly away from himself upward to the common source 
of light. It is the ultimate result of all religious truth to 
put us in communion with God, and for one less than God 
to take the place of God, even by indirection, is to inter- 
cept love and worship, is to impose a degrading supersti- 
tion by a daring assumption. The light, the divine light 
of revelation, must come through Christ, freely through 
him, as from our common Father ; or it must come from 
him. This question of divine attributes can not be dealt 
with carelessly, as we see in the case of Paul and Barnabas, 
whom the men of Lycaonia were ready to receive as gods. 
They rent their clothes and ran in among the people cry- 
ing out, ' Sirs, why do ye these things ? ' The whole method 
of Christ becomes a bewilderment, if he may not, by direct 
right, stand in his assumed attitude. What wound could 
be comparable with this by which the love and aspirations 
of truthful hearts are wrongfully appropriated. The entire 
drift of the Gospels calls for divinity in Christ as the least 
gift which can sustain his words, and give integrity to his 
character. The failure becomes complete and fatal, if he 
falls off from his largest claim. There is no secondary 
truthful and good work which can be done under these 
misleading and false conditions. The highest good is 
turned into the worst evil, lacking its own integrity and 
sincerity. The core of virtue can not perish, and any- 
thing worth possessing remain to it. Christ, because of 
the very magnitude of his claims, must be judged by their 
absolute truthfulness. He attempts too much to admit of 
a partial success. Like other kings, he must win a throne 
or perish. The divinity of Christ seems to us, therefore, 
to infold the entire narrative of the Gospels. We see not 
what can be saved without it, except it be scattered prin- 
ciples, the planks of a wreck, and of these the world has 
enough. The spiritual power of the New Testament unites 



408 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

with its formal declarations in enforcing the doctrine of 
the divinity of our Lord. Our faith is not grounded in 
exegesis merely, but in living experiences as well, that 
cry out for this consoling truth in the cast of the divine 
method. 

There is also another confirmation, Christ bears for us 
the divine lineaments. We do not indeed assume to pro- 
nounce positively on the divine. Revelation is as much a 
loss on one side as it is a gain on another. If there is 
something given in it, there is yet more that is withheld. 
The Infinite, in assuming a finite form, whether of act, word 
or person, falls away from its own fullness, and loses the 
measureless majesty of the divine, lapsing into restricted 
utterance. We know God and we know him not, and we 
know best when the definite and the indefinite are brought 
nearest together. We can not say of our conception of 
the character of Christ, This is final, this is sufficient, this 
is infinite, this is divine. I think we can say, This above 
all characters expands before our vision and leads us on, 
this grows as we grow, or we grow because this grows and 
we follow after, this lies in the line of our revelation, our 
way heavenward is by it. 

The incarnation is a deep humiliation, yet hardly in the 
way in which it is often thought to be.. Its humbling lies 
not in its hardships, but in its restrictions, its barriers to 
infinite wisdom and love. A body, a mind, a life that are 
made to utter a simple human soul, how shall these utter 
the divine soul ? How must that soul wrestle with them ? 
The majesty of Heaven can not find expression here, 
above all not to the senses ; — and to how few is anything 
expressed that is not sensibly uttered — it is laid aside that 
truths more restricted, more capable of delivery, may come 
quietly to the foreground. Spiritual principles, stripped 
of all accessories that might dazzle or mislead, are to find 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 4°9 

a slow, partial, patient utterance, fitted to feeble, receptive 
powers — food for babes. This it is for the Divine to 
become incarnate, to veil itself in flesh. What wisdom, 
therefore, is requisite to discern and use this wisdom, to 
understand and justify this obscure, but only possible, 
revelation. The heart and mind must be alive with a 
divine light and insight to enter into the divinity of Christ. 
To thousands of souls so alive, it does daily and hourly 
confirm, by the glory with which it clothes itself, and the 
quiet, untiring lead it takes in guiding them upward, its 
own largest claims. 

There seem to be some imperative rational conditions 
of a revelation of God in Christ. The humiliation, that is 
the lowly guise, the straitened truths, the humble procedure, 
the slow giving, must be accepted as alone sufficient to 
bring the truth near enough to us, and to unite it to our 
lives. We have little power to apprehend spiritual things, 
and still less to use them. Our faculties are incipient. 
God descends then till he meets us on the low level of life, 
on the conditions offered by the incarnation. Once on 
this level, the truths which can be enunciated are those 
only which are there and then conformable with it. If 
the truths unfolded are transcendent in certain bearings of 
them, they are also, in other relations, interlocked with the 
thoughts of men, and have an instant hold on their action. 
We must look, then, for the proofs of the divinity of Christ 
offered by his character, remembering that they are sub- 
jected to these rigorous restrictions, are full of perplexity, 
and easily misconceivable. We search for the truth, 
knowing that the truth when found must owe its glory to 
its interior force, and receive little or no aid from its sor- 
did conditions and narrow forms ; that we are dealing with 
germs whose full strength can only be disclosed by thou- 
sands of years of growth ; that we are thrown back on our 
i3 



4 IQ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

own power to penetrate moral beauty, and pronounce 
upon it. 

So conceiving the conditions under which the divine 
forces are unfolded in the life of Christ, let us look at that 
life for indications of its nature. It is the moral or spirit- 
ual powers of man that call for development, those powers 
by which he discerns the true scope of his being, and the 
law implanted in it. What the universe is to the intellect 
of man, that God is to his spiritual affections. The divinity 
of Christ is disclosed, it seems to us, in the fact that he 
makes so pure and single an appeal to the moral nature. 
There are no divisions, no distractions here ; the words and 
life of Christ are all directed to our spiritual apprehensions, 
and quicken and deepen them with wonderful and inex- 
haustible vigor. The motives, the impressions, which 
accompany wealth, rank, power, display, are entirely laid 
aside. They could have no other effect than to disguise 
the purely personal, spiritual force of the truths to be pre- 
sented. Nothing could be more stripped of external 
adjuncts, more devoid of factitious aids, than were the 
actions and instructions of Christ. When the moral ele- 
ment in him began at any time indirectly to gather and 
involve lower elements, when crowds were assembling, 
excitement spreading, and disciples multiplying, he care- 
fully broke the flow of events, scattered the alien, conflict- 
ing forces, and got back again to solitude and a purely 
moral position. That this method involves the highest 
wisdom, yet one not at all consonant with hasty, eager, 
ambitious, human thoughts, is evident. Truth, as spiritual, 
supersensual, is most frequently lost among men by being 
hidden, overlaid with sensible, immediate interests, with 
excitements, with social considerations. The mind is 
never left more absolutely alone with simple truth than by 
the words of Christ. How alien this method is to human 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 411 

thought is seen in the fact, that Celsus early offered it as an 
objection to Christianity. 

A kindred fact in the method of Christ is that he makes 
no use of philosophy as philosophy, nor seeks to enlarge 
knowledge as knowledge. The intellect, while called into 
high activity, is engaged not primarily in its own interests, 
but in those of the spiritual intuitions. Herein is a yet 
stronger temptation escaped, and one which a mind mov- 
ing on a purely human plane would hardly look upon as a 
temptation, might naturally enough regard as an oppor- 
tunity. Spiritual philosophy, new truths in the domain of 
theology, systematized principles of conduct, these are the 
best contributions of the individual mind, and it can not, 
therefore, easily be held aloof from them. They are, 
indeed, involved in the instruction of Christ, but they are 
not evolved ; they are held as science is in the facts of 
nature. The words of Christ are as devoid of the purely 
speculative character, of the discipleship of belief which 
attends on an active, constructive intellect, as they are of 
conventional influences. They are fragmentary, positive, 
practical, popular, and are left by their own force to shift 
for themselves. A most marked characteristic of his 
instruction is its consistent, yet sporadic, cast ; its power 
of attaching itself to facts. His words have an occasion, 
and the occasion sets limits to the lesson, and gives the 
key of its interpretation. Even the Sermon on the Mount 
is the knitting together of many occasions, and the uniting 
of a series of lessons, each pertinent to the peculiar con- 
dition of the audience. Its announcements are vivid flashes 
of light, which each mind is left to use as it can. The 
seeds of thought and action are dropped by Christ together 
in the soil, as its condition gives him opportunity. This 
is the purely spiritual or moral method. If thought is 
separated from action, instruction lapses into philosophy. 



412 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Or if action is urged, it is action without the insight and 
impulse that should inform and shape it; a ritual is insti- 
tuted, or a creed set up, more and more divorcing them- 
selves from the life. The germs of a truly spiritual product 
must hold in even balance both elements, the emotional 
and the intellectual, unfolding themselves in constant inter- 
action along a line of conduct. This balance we have in 
the words of Christ ; he leaves on the right and the left 
every other path, and steadily pursues the one simple, 
spiritual method, which can vindicate itself only to a long 
time and to large discernment. This peculiar feature in 
the instructions of Christ puts his life and teachings among 
the most permanent and unchangeable of moral powers, 
allies them to nature, whose principles are inlocked with 
facts, and held firm by them. 

As closely connected with this separation of the words 
of Christ from all influences in the least alien to them, or 
liable to embarrass or obscure them, may be mentioned 
their positive form. His truths are stated and used in an 
authoritative, popular way. Science draws the mind from 
particulars to systematic, coherent, underlying principles ; 
it looks inward to the dependencies of truth. Popular dis- 
course reverses the movement. It looks outward ; it pre- 
sents the principle in a specific application ) it announces 
its proposition, and reflects probability and authority on it 
by its uses. It expounds and applies the truth in the 
same act ; and we infer what it is by what it does. Our 
attention is not directed to the light as light, but by the 
light we see the things it reveals. This positive method is 
especially applicable to spiritual truths, and safe as used 
with the highest insight. Spiritual truths hold the two 
elements, emotional and intellectual, in even, sympathetic 
action, and this they can only do by virtue of conduct. 
Combined otherwise than in action, the light and the heat, 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 413 

the revelation and the inspiration, of the truths of our 
higher nature are lost. Neither constituent can be long 
held without the other, nor can they be otherwise blended 
evenly and beautifully than in conduct. The words of 
Christ, therefore, as popular, are complete in structure, are 
the fertile seeds of conduct, can enlarge in thought and 
deepen in emotion, doing both by a normal growth. They 
are also sure of a relatively correct interpretation, and can 
retain their vital force for successive generations. The 
principle is attached to its appropriate fact in action, and 
the two balance and expound each other. We can hardly 
miss the truth, for it has a double definition in words and 
in events. Its position and direction are both given ; the 
one corrects the other, and the orbit of a noble life is laid 
down. 

This vigor and certainty, yet expansiveness and depth, 
of the positive method, the method that appeals most 
directly and vigorously to the soul of man, are well seen in 
Christ's treatment of the woman taken in adulter}'. There 
is here very little exposition, no guiding propositions are 
laid down, there is no ground given for controversy ; yet 
in a guarded, practical way, the most significant hints of 
character are made. The unforgiving severity of the 
Pharisees is rebuked, their hypocrisy is exposed, the 
woman is censured and forgiven, and the supreme end of 
law made manifest, to wit : to save society and rescue the 
criminal. Sympathetic mercy and stern censure proceed 
even-handed in the words of Christ, and it is difficult to 
pervert either of them from their purpose. A scientific 
statement would not have hit so exactly, so concisely, so 
safely, so suggestively, the case ; nor been left open to the 
same free, progressive use. In the beginning it would 
have spoken more obscurely, and, in the end, more rigidly. 
The mind and heart are left to see, to feel, and to expand 



414 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the truth, and can hardly find fault therefore with their 
own work. 

The instructions of Christ constantly involve principles, 
and rarely accept the restriction of precepts ; they indicate 
the spirit which is to shape the action, and do not often 
delineate the action itself. Principles call forth, in the 
first instance, a much more comprehensive activity of mind 
than do precepts, and, in their expansion, are left wholly 
to the wisdom and good-will of those who use them. Pre- 
cepts are the badges of ignorance and servitude, no matter 
how wise they are j principles are the assistance which one 
mind gives another, in an independent use of the truth. 
Principles nourish alike the intellectual and voluntary fac- 
ulties, while precepts bend them to a following which may 
easily lapse into blind obedience. When we obey the pre- 
cept, the impelling power is in another's will, the wisdom 
in another's thought ; when we accept the principle, the 
insight and the impulse rest with us. Precepts are inflexi- 
ble and suffer from an exterior, formal tendency that sep- 
arates them more and more from the variable, moral con- 
ditions of life. Pursuing their own path they gradually 
part from the exigencies of the time, the duties of the hour, 
the conditions of growth. It is impossible for precepts 
sufficiently to forecast the future, and hence the devotee, 
sent off in a straight line of formal service, departs more 
and more from self-centered social life, and shapes an 
experience increasingly barren in wholesome, living results. 
A system of rules, rites, dogmas, a mechanism of any kind, 
must be repeatedly revolutionized to restore them to 
harmony with that general society in which they are to 
operate. 

From organization, from precepts, rituals and dogmas, 
the ostensible means by which men are bound to a cause 
and a leader, Christ turns wholly aside. He lodges the 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 415 

principles of action, the germs of truth, in the heart and 
mind, and leaves each person to make a free, flexible use 
of them. Liberty, without declaration or ostentation, is 
made a cardinal feature of his method. The primary 
sacraments of the' Christian church are few and simple, 
and take upon themselves no uniform preceptive outline ; 
while its chief organic relations were left by Christ to be 
shaped historically and progressively. We have striven 
to narrow this our freedom, but there it remains, in spite 
of us, only emphasized by our conflicting claims. The 
Christian Sabbath and the Christian church are so feebly 
defined, that we may easily deny them any formal defini- 
tion, and must search our own spiritual constitution for 
their best supports. What greater constructive freedom 
could be given to the Christian spirit than is given by the 
words of Christ, "The Sabbath was made for man and 
not man for the Sabbath." He avoids guarding and nar- 
rowing this declaration, but leaves it with its full distinc- 
tive and constructive energy in it. He thus puts, even in 
reference to this most general, positive and venerable pre- 
cept, the Christian soul afresh into possession of itself, and 
the entire field of moral action. This is not to abolish the 
Sabbath, but to restore it in men's thoughts to a constitu- 
tional, a natural, basis. 

The instructions of Christ which have the narrowness 
in form of precepts must yet be used with a fresh render- 
ing of them into principles. His injunction, " Whosoever 
shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other 
also," is of this nature. Employed unreservedly, as a 
positive command, it undoes the constructive laws of 
society, its organic rights and duties ; resolved into a tem- 
per of mind, a principle of forgiveness in the soul's private 
economy, and it bears with it the patience and healing love 
of Christ. The definition of a neighbor and the duties of 



416 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the relation are given in this same narrow, yet broad, way 
in the parable of the good Samaritan. The principle is 
enclosed in an illustration, and the concluding injunction, 
" Go and do thou likewise," is to be obeyed in the spirit 
of the act narrated. We are awakened to guide ourselves 
by what is implied in the words of Christ, rather than 
directly guided by them. It is not till the mind has dwelt 
on them, and gotten hold of their spirit, that it can begin 
its profiting. They are spirit and they are life. 

The instructions of Christ being thus spiritual more 
than intellectual, or conjointly intellectual and spiritual, 
aroused affections are essential to their comprehension and 
use. As a consequence, they carry greater force and 
receive deeper meaning with every advanced stage of our 
experience. Our spiritual states are the lenses which, with 
perpetual improvement and readjustment, bring into more 
perfect outline the conceptions, the revelations breaking 
forth from the mind of Christ. The dry, cold light of the 
intellect does not avail for these teachings. There is heat 
in them, and the light by which they are to be compre- 
hended is largely incident to that heat. The words of 
Christ addressed to Peter are of this character. "Thou 
art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church." 
Looked at on a low plane of dry statement, they are mis- 
leading ; regarded from a higher plane, with insight into 
the living dependencies of truth, and Peter, the personifica- 
tion of the confession which had just fallen from his lips, 
becomes the foundation-stone in the kingdom. To see 
the revelation of God in Christ, and rejoice in it, is to 
stand in the morning light of the coming day. If we start 
off with the words of Christ at too low an emotional level, 
we find ourselves perplexed, baffled, misled ; starting 
from the moral elevation from which they themselves have 
sprung, we glide serenely out into a clear, open sky. Birds, 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 417 

with a faltering instinct, clash themselves against the light- 
house and perish ; if they could only, unbewildered, thread 
the night by its beams, they should find in them safety and 
good cheer. 

The sudden impulse of spiritual life given by Christ to 
his instructions is seen in the unexpected answer he gave 
to those who said to him, that his kindred without desired 
to speak with him. "Who is my mother? and who are 
my brethren ? And he stretched forth his hand toward 
his disciples and said, Behold my mother and my brethren ! 
For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in 
heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." 
There is thus an instantaneous power and expansion im- 
parted to Christian sympathies, by which, like rising waters, 
they engulf all emotions. The parable of the prodigal son, 
with the complaint of the older brother ; and that of the 
workmen, hired at different hours into the vineyard, with 
their complaint of injustice to the master, are an exposure 
of justice as a barren basis of life, are assertions set up in 
behalf of freedom, of the affections, and their right to their 
own warm, native movement. 

The words of Christ are often destructive, extreme, 
undeveloped. The iconoclastic phrase, It hath been said 
of them of old time, but I say unto you, gives tone to the 
Sermon on the Mount. The law of God, in its true spirit- 
ual power, was made to confront the tradition of the elders 
concerning service withheld from parents and consecrated 
as a gift to God ; while their purifications were brushed 
aside with the assertion, " There is nothing from without 
a man that entering into him can defile him." These were 
such inroads in the Jewish ceremonial as looked to its 
annihilation. His language is extreme. The proselyting 
of the Jews is the making of converts who are twofold more 
the children of hell. Every idle word is made a ground 
18* 



418 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

of divine judgment; and guilt under the law at one point 
is pronounced guilt at every point. His words are often 
undeveloped. " It is easier for a camel to go through the 
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom 
of Heaven." " If any man come to me and hate not his 
father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, 
and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my 
disciple." Contrast this passage with the one above, in 
which these same affections are made the type of our spir- 
itual love. A method like this is the boldest appeal .to 
thought ; nothing can be made of it without thought, and 
the liberty thought involves. A dangerous weapon is put 
in the hand of the neophyte, one with which he may injure 
himself or another, and he is compelled to learn its uses. 
Think ; at your peril, think : take the hint given and pursue 
it wisely, this is the tacit injunction. " He that has ears to 
hear let him hear." " Do ye not understand this parable, 
how then can ye understand all parables ! " Speaking by 
parables is a method directly advanced by Christ as one 
fitted to hide the truth from the indolent and ill-disposed ; 
and to disclose it to attentive, concessive minds. Hasty 
discipleship Christ diligently shuns. Those who follow 
him must wittingly forsake all. The multitudes are sent 
back to their homes. The young man, commendable in 
virtue, and eager for the new service, is tested at the most 
tender point, his great possessions. The symbol of fellow- 
ship with Christ is the shoulder cruelly laden with a cross. 
Christ seems willing that the Pharisees should be impressed 
by his words as parables, riddles and contradictions, rather 
than that they should be allowed to hastily take them up 
either in superficial acceptance or rejection. "Therefore 
speak I to them in parables ; because they seeing see not ; 
and hearing, they hear not : neither do they understand." 
We wonder at times at the enigmatical character of his 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 419 

instructions. The slow. literal mind seems harshly treated. 
There is hardly the accommodation, the gentleness, the 
consideration we should expect. There is no effort to 
grade down the ascent to truth. " Except ye eat the flesh 
of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in 
you." "This is my body." We are ready to ask, why 
should Luther and many another devout man be left to 
stumble over such words, lying as an obstacle in the path 
of the literalist ? Yet the method is justified, and more than 
justified, to the penetrative, spiritual mind. Thus only 
could the downward, short-sighted, groping instincts of 
semi-enlightened natures be met and overcome. It is a 
war against the letter in behalf of the spirit, against outer 
guidance in behalf of inner light ; a submission of forms 
to the changeable, living impulses which should control 
them. No method is more remote from immediate success, 
a large, instant and enthusiastic following, than this ; and 
there is none that can so renew itself from generation to 
generation, carry its resources with it, and, at each shift, 
so grapple the mind and heart with fresh and enlarged 
energy. Its detachment from the present is its command 
of the future. 

The instructions of Christ are thus in the highest degree 
constructive, with a patient, protracted, growing power. 
There is a fundamental principle of action in them 
expressed in the words, " Whosoever will save his life, 
shall lose it;" a sympathetic and living impulse under 
that action, disclosed in the words, " He that eateth my 
flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in 
him ;" and a goal of action, an organic harmony of action, 
included in the great command, "Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy mind." The life of Christ thus becomes an 
example of ri^ht living ; the cross of Christ the svmbol of 



420 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

right living ; the resurrection and rule of Christ the victory 
and promise of right living, a living that, complete in itself, 
vanquishes death, and bears away its spoils. Destruction 
is showy and easy, construction is the test of strength. 
The deeper, broader, more sufficient the new life evoked, 
the greater the miracle. The miracle of Christ is the 
possession of a life, and the imparting of a life, that enters 
into the life of God. 

Christ handles boldly, freely the natural and supernat- 
ural. The supernatural is never allowed to push the nat- 
ural from its pedestal, to cast into the dust the solid, sym- 
metrical, beautiful work of God in nature. At this point 
came the first and second temptation to Christ, to turn 
stones into bread, to cast himself down from the pinnacle 
of the temple ; to let the miracle have way in and over 
nature. At this point fanaticism and overthrow oftenest 
find entrance in religion. It is forgotten that grace is a 
victory in nature not over nature, that God's work is not 
at war with itself, that the natural conditions of salvation 
define it by his own ordinance. The grounds for rational, 
systematic and symmetrical inquiry and action are thus 
left to man, and the supernatural expends itself along the 
lines of the natural, under the constitution from the begin- 
ning ordained of God. This restraint of Christ, this work- 
ing within the spiritual powers of the mind, may at first 
disguise his divinity, at length it discloses it. It is not in 
any supernatural brilliancy that his glory abides, but in 
this quiet, ineffable fullness of his own character. 

On the other hand Christ is not fearful of the super- 
natural j he has no scientific nervousness on this point ; he 
approaches it as a master. He withholds signs, and cen- 
sures the wonder-loving, sign-seeking temper, but he deals 
freely from a spiritual, supersensual position with the phys- 
ical and moral problems before him. He does not allow 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 421 

the physical to build itself up either in independence of, or 
opposition to, the spiritual. He causes the spiritual to 
touch and visibly to control the physical. He thus lays 
as deeply the foundations of faith as of prudence, and 
gives belief the range of both worlds. Herein he seems 
to us to have steadily preserved that straight line of wis- 
dom which divides superstition and science, the spirit 
which was in his time and the spirit which is in our time, 
the partial and opposing movements to which the mind of 
man is subject. Christ without miracles would have been 
an anomaly, a fresh hiding, rather than a fresh disclosure, 
of the invisible world ; Christ, a wonder-worker, would 
have been one more marvel in a world already misled by 
a thousand false lights. Light, measured light, light for 
guidance, for work and for faith, for labor and for encour- 
agement, as we march through the darkness, seems to 
us the divine ministration of Christ, standing between 
two worlds to both of which he and we belong. A light, 
therefore, from above must fall upon him, and that light 
must go forth from him in its mild, normal nature. 

Such is somewhat of the inherent character of the 
teachings of Christ, the vigor that is in them. They care- 
fully put aside every sensational, partial element; they are 
boldly, strongly moral ; they seek no extraneous aid from 
wealth, station, popular eclat, or serene speculation ; they 
are uncompromising toward adversaries, deep and search- 
ing toward adherents, penetrating, thoughtful, even to 
obscurity, toward all. They concede nothing to indolence 
or indifference. There is in them not one partisan, popu- 
lar or fanatical element, save as so deep, earnest, and 
separate a movement must itself have seemed at times to 
approach fanaticism. This very peculiar, clearly devised 
and steadily maintained method of Christ was pursued 
under circumstances provoking every moment the opposite 



422 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

error. He was dealing with purely religious questions, in 
a bigoted, fanatical, excitable nation, in a relatively super- 
stitious era, at a period when influence must either turn on 
visible, extraneous forces, or be vigorously sustained by 
them. A purely moral movement was as difficult of con- 
ception as of execution. No germ of control could then 
spring up without gathering to itself these factitious aids, 
without the instant temptation to expand it by these ordi- 
nary methods of increase. 

Yet the teachings of Christ remain from the beginning 
to the end with the same simple, single, moral force, and 
are left to do their own work by their own innate power. 
The form of his life, his words to the people, and his 
esoteric instruction in the circle of his disciples, bear 
alike the one transcendental impress of a spiritual nature. 
There is at no time and in no place a single trace of creed, 
ritual or organization. All is hazarded on the primitive 
power of truth, and all is left to it. The result has been 
that this living seed has been again and again partially 
overwhelmed, that it has perished over large fields and 
through long periods, that it has lost every advantage save 
its own force, and yet, kept alive in quiet nooks, it has 
suddenly reappeared on old and worn-out soil and in new 
territory. To-day it grows as thriftily as ever. The inner 
life and full moral vigor of the words of Christ are there, 
and are more clearly apprehended by more minds than 
ever before in the world's history. The Kingdom of Christ 
advances. The miracles recede into the past, and suffer 
from its obscurity ; Christ, as a divine person, comes to the 
foreground, and gathers all the light of the opening years. 
He, divinely natural, sustains the supernatural that attends 
upon him. 

Here is a marvel. Instructions which so transcend 
the period in which they were uttered as to provoke every 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 423 

kind of perversion and repression, have yet possessed such 
innate vigor that they have ruled it and subsequent ages, 
equally in their false as in their true forms ; seeds that 
have borne the violence and wash of intervening years 
still spring up from under the debris with more vitality, 
more delicacy of form, than ever before, beginning anew 
to put forth the beauty and the strength that are in them. 
I know not what a moral kingdom, what a divine revela- 
tion, should be unless they are such a kingdom and such 
a revelation as these. These complete, heroic, moral 
proportions are, in the history of our race, found in Christ 
only, traits which in their courage lose nothing of tender- 
ness, and in their tenderness never miss the firm edge of 
courage. 

The wonder is triple, that words so purely moral 
should not have perished at once from the crass earth, 
unable to root anywhere ; that taking root they were not 
sooner or later smothered and lost by the manifold, per- 
sistent, overshadowing fungi of superstition and passion 
that fastened and fed on them ; that, springing up again 
in these remote times and places, they show more than 
the beauty and vigor of youth. By virtue of these facts 
Christ is to all believers and unbelievers the one divine 
figure that leads the spiritual history of the race. "A 
matchless man," says Renan, u so grand that although 
here all must be judged from a purely scientific point of 
view, I would not gainsay those who, struck with the 
exceptional character of his work, call him God. 1 '* "Even 
to-day rationalism dares not look at him closely except on 
its knees, "t 

There are, indeed, a few who sincerely, though it seems 
to us very mistakingly, criticise the character of Christ in 
its moral perfection. Francis W. Newman, whose works 
* Religious History and Criticism, p. 161. f Ibid, p. 213. 



424 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

are marked by a candid and earnest spirit, in his Phases 
of Faith, speaks in this way of Christ, disclosing as he 
thinks some minor blemishes of temper. "The aim of 
Jesus was not so much to enlighten the young man as to 
stop his mouth, and keep up his own ostentation of omni- 
science. " # The circumstances under which the words of 
Christ were spoken are not given with a sufficiently strong 
and clear outline for us to decide at once and peremptorily 
on their fitness and temper. If we suppose one phase of 
character in the person addressed, the language may seem 
harsh, if another, it may wholly and easily justify itself. 
His manner toward the Syro-Phcenician woman strikes 
one as repellant; yet we find that its ostensible character 
was the reverse of its real character. So much depends 
on the way in which words are spoken, that, missing the 
intonation, we should speak with hesitancy of their spirit. 
The uniform, compassionate and tender character of 
Christ's instructions makes it but ordinary justice to accord 
to him the manner, and to presume those phases of char- 
acter, which tone down his words to wisdom and love. 
The above criticism seems to us unfair and presumptuous. 
Certainly the supposition is natural and probable, in refer- 
ence to the young ruler, that with, all his virtue he was 
thoroughly attached to his conventional views, to his wealth 
and to his rank, and that a sufficiently deep issue could 
not otherwise be taken with him so clearly, quickly and 
conveniently as by the words of Christ. The more nearly 
he approximated the truth, while missing it, the more 
decisive was the test needed to disclose to him the radical, 
yet hidden, discrepancy. There is indeed a startling 
thoroughness in the command, " Go and sell that thou 
hast," but we can easily believe it to have been the most 
considerate, faithful and kind language, fitted to deter the 

X P- 157- 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 425 

young man from a useless, half-hearted discipleship, and 
force him to a complete work. 

The severity with which Christ denounced the Phari- 
sees requires also the explanation of a predominant, unspar- 
ing religious purpose. An open, violent separation of his 
instruction in spirit and aim from those of the Pharisees 
was a first necessity. Only thus could his doctrines and 
his disciples be isolated, aggregated, and prepared to 
make head as an independent power. In the same degree 
in which Christ cast aside external distinctions, must he 
insist on internal ones. Existence, a free footing, call for, 
must often cost, severe blows. Many things, even things 
better than those about them, must be dealt with unspar- 
ingly, because they lie as the immediate obstacle in the 
way of progress. It was this temper of mind, which 
falls to a prophet who must not only speak the truth, but 
plant it ; who must not only save his own soul, but organ- 
ize the forces that are to work salvation in others, that led 
Christ to exclaim, " I am come to send fire on the earth ; 
and what will I if it be already kindled ? But I have a 
baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened 
till it be accomplished ! Suppose ye that I am come to 
give peace on earth ? I tell you, Nay, but rather division." 
The courtesies and gracious concessions of life can play 
no great part in such a mission. 

The supposition that Christ was in any sense a pre- 
tender, deserves no consideration. The inherent contra- 
dictions of character incident to it are as great as they 
could be. No hypothesis could be more fully refuted by 
the* facts it undertakes to explain. The only suppositions 
that remain are, that his declarations concerning himself 
are the sober truth, or that they sprang from an element 
of fanaticism in him. This element, if admitted at all, 
must enter in an extreme, decided form ; since he claims 



426 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

at once to be sinless, and the Son of God. What he meant 
by these last words is sufficiently plain by the impression 
he made by them. That impression was one of blasphemy, 
and blasphemy of so decided a character as to carry with 
it the penalty of death. The institution of such a claim, 
and the quiet adherence to it when made by the Sanhedrim 
the ground of a capital accusation, imply either its truth- 
fulness, or an inordinate fanaticism. The contradictions 
of this last supposition are only less than those which 
would belong to him as a pretender. If we accept the 
essential correctness of the Gospel narratives, — and if we 
do not, we shall be utterly at a loss to account for their 
sobriety and coherence, arising as they do at diverse periods 
and with diverse authors; utterly at a loss to account for a 
picture so much beyond the powers of those who painted it 
— then the features we have dwelt on in the words of Christ, 
their pure moral power, their wise penetrative character, 
their separation from all factitious influences, their direct 
appeal to the reason, are such as could not belong to one 
deeply tinged with fanaticism, and that, too, in an arrogant 
and profane form. It is impossible to entertain a fanaticism 
of this dye without a disclosure of it everywhere. Such 
combinations, such contradictions, are not found in human 
experience. No mind is at once sober and penetrative 
beyond its own and every other age, and at the same 
time fanatical up to the last point of assumption. Fanat- 
icism, if not sin, is disease, and can not be perfectly local ; 
it has in it a taint and a fever heat quite beyond what this 
view recognizes. 

Nothing but a strong predisposition to deny the divin- 
ity of Christ would lead us to this conclusion, a predis- 
position allied to that against miracles, causing many to 
struggle with the plain, historic character of the Gospels. 
As we share neither of these prejudgments, we can not 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 427 

have much sympathy with the distortions they give rise to. 
Our philosophy prepares us for a quiet acceptance of the 
supernatural, and we can, therefore, allow proof pertaining 
to it to have its natural force. Our feeling is not that of 
Renan : " Who is not pained to see the wonder-worker by 
the side of the sublime moralist, to find in the Gospels, on 
the same page with the Sermon on the Mount, or the 
discourse at the Supper, stories of men possessed, which, if 
invented in our time, would meet nothing but incredulity 
or a smile."* 

Difficulties necessarily attend upon an incarnation. 
Divine powers can not appear on the level of ordinary 
natural forces without disturbance and partial obscurity, 
without restrictions which to the unwise may seem soil. 
The river can not overpass its banks and retain its tran- 
quillity. That explanation, that conception, struggling to 
gather up the known and the unknown in harmony, is the 
best which proceeds most simply, and puts the new mani- 
festation in most direct connection with the old. Christ 
does not appear under the conditions of our life, but 
under those of two thousand years ago. His first word 
was to that generation, his first interpretation by that gen- 
eration. It is as foolish a piece of assumption to claim 
that he should take up our modern science, as it would be 
that he should have based his action on that of two thou- 
sand years hence. The question simply is, shall truth be 
lost to a defective present by being removed into an un- 
approachable future, or shall that future be called on to 
gather its truth along a historic past ? 

If we believe in a personal God, and one who has a 
double method of revelation, in the natural and the super- 
natural, in matter and in mind, in that which is addressed 
to us as beings trained to work, and that which is ad- 
* Religious History and Criticism, p. 221. 



428 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

dressed to us as beings taught to trust and love, then the 
coming of Christ is supported by the entire method of 
Heaven, and is the culmination of the two revelations. 
His character and mission as much demand the super- 
natural as the natural, as he is, in his own being, deeply 
supernatural, and purposes to put us into a more living 
connection with the invisible and spiritual. While he is not, 
by the least, to lift us out of nature, he is to lift us and 
nature into a closer, more conscious contact with God ; 
and this under the conditions of thought then current. 
No scientific attitude, no speculative astuteness, no phil- 
osophical ideal, fell to Christ ; — they are each too narrow — 
but an incarnation of spiritual truth, a close living contact 
of the love of God with humanity, a disclosure of the true 
force of the religious nature. Simple acceptance of cur- 
rent intellectual and social conditions, and a revelation 
under them of moral truth and religious love, were alone 
in order. A theory about devils was no more a perplexity 
than a theory about government ; Jewish demonology than 
Jewish sociology ; nor to be treated in a different way. We 
do not say that all difficulties disappear under this view 
of the incarnation, but that the character of Christ stands 
in easy harmony with it, and his words are left by it to 
shed the most undisturbed light. 

On the other hand, we are involved in the deepest per- 
plexity, if we attempt to escape the supernatural in Christ. 
These threads are so many, and so woven into the first 
web, that if we draw them, the whole fabric becomes loose 
and flimsy to the last degree, and is soon flung aside. 
The miracles are not detached events here and there, they 
are everywhere. The instructions of Christ grow out of 
them, and lead to them. His most stimulating truths of 
clearest insight find occasion in them, as in the work of 
healing wrought on the Sabbath. The transfiguration of 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 429 

Christ, the cure of the lunatic that followed it, the conver- 
sation with the woman of Samaria, are illustrations of the 
indissoluble way in which the two elements blend in his 
character. We can not save one without the other; our 
analysis is destructive. We do not pretend to say how far 
contradictions may enter into human action, but a great 
and symmetrical character can neither be torn apart in its 
constitution, nor cut asunder, without destroying utterly 
the life it expresses. Christ's character and teachings, 
transcendent as they are, are knit together with a most ■ 
constant and complete, complex and delicate, union of the 
natural and supernatural, and we must take them or leave 
them for what they are in their own inherent consistency. 
The words of Christ are utterly alien to the- modern sci- 
entific spirit, are built upon the idea of a hidden, spiritual 
faith, and can not be saved with any show of integrity, 
unless we also accept this their underlying principle. 

We may speak of him, if we will, as a wonder-worker, 
a dealer with familiar spirits, but no two things could be 
more at war with each other than the sobriety and practical 
force of his teachings, and the conceptions of character 
which science attaches to these words. It was some such 
substitution of ideas, some such obscuration of the super- 
natural by the sub-natural, that was the fatal, blinding 
sin of the Pharisees. It is only when we admit the super- 
natural as a glorious and crowning fact in the spiritual 
world, that this contradiction passes away, this collision 
of the best and worst in character, giving rise to the pain 
spoken of by Renan, disappears, and Christ stands again 
before us with undimmed aureola. 

If it be urged that there is little or no effort on the 
part of Christ to lift up and restrict the supernatural, to 
put it on a rational basis, but that he accepts it under the 
perversions of his time, its demoniacs, its human and its 



43© A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

animal possessions, we answer, this is also in accordance 
with the true spirit of his teachings, if we admit the great, 
underlying truth, the supernatural presence of God in the 
world. It no more falls to him to give an exact rendering 
of the doctrine of demoniacal possessions than that of the 
resurrection, or of the relation of the soul to the body. 
A diversion from his purpose could have been made at 
this point as easily as at another, nay, more easily ; and 
the moral force of his words been evaporated into a thau- 
maturgic theory, or what would have so presented itself to 
others. Christ systematically left the separation of the 
true and the false, in current opinion and action, to follow 
on under the dividing power of leading principles, and so 
allowed the details of truth to be settled as they always 
must be, by its great issues. We see no reason why in 
this instance he should have done differently ; or why he 
should have been more anxious on this topic to prevent 
mistake, or to anticipate progress, than on many others. 
Christ, as a scientist on this theme, would have had less 
not more moral power, would have been less near to his 
primary purpose, to touch with a living spirit the life then 
current, to anticipate neither one nor another change of 
opinion, but to give the germinant truths of development. 
Side discussions once opened, there would have been no 
end to the diversion of thought. No other method was 
possible. If growth was to be forestalled in one particular, 
then should it have been in all, and the goal and the 
starting point been made to touch each other. What I 
may call the spiritual costume of Christ, involving as it 
does no complicity with sin, ought.no more to disturb us 
than his Jewish features, or Jewish mantle. This yearning 
for an intellectual ideal proceeds in ignorance of the pur- 
pose of the incarnation, and its method of fulfillment. 
Christ, in filling out any one intellectual conception, would 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 43 £ 

have become the Christ of a sect, or a class, or a period, 
and so would have missed every other sect and class and 
period. There is no intellectual state, in fine-drawn 
speculative features, that can be admissible and ideal to 
all generations. Christ truly humbled himself, that is sub- 
mitted himself, to that which he professed to accept and 
spiritually transfigure, human life under its then conditions. 
It is enough that he planted the truths which have been 
fruitful in all later harvests. 

We have proceeded on the supposition that demoniacal 
possession is an absurdity, and that science has a plain, 
sufficient, and contradictory truth to put in its place. 
This is conceding more than the facts of the case call for \ 
great mystery envelops the relation of the' mind and its 
physical organs, and he is a bold speculator who will assert 
what is and what is not possible in this region, what has 
and what has not been. Whatever we shall find good 
reason to believe on this subject, the moral penetration 
and integrity of Christ are no more implicated here than 
in his attitude toward the marginal facts of another exist- 
ence, a personal and supreme devil, the mysteries of death 
and the resurrection, a future life — all that he leaves more 
or less under the shadow of current opinion. 

If now, pushing aside this conception of Christ, deny- 
ing the validity of the supernatural, we allow the deepest 
tinge of fanaticism to enter into his character, we have at 
once forced upon us the most painful contradictions. The 
vainest and the blindest methods in morals are made to 
meet the highest and the clearest, and the two grow 
together and out of each other. We may then well ask 
with Renan, " If, as the Italian sophists of the sixteenth 
century maintained, religion had been invented by the 
simple and the weak, how comes it that the finest nations 
are precisely the most religious?" How comes it that 



432 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

those most deeply imbued with the pure light of a spirit- 
ual reason, those lifted highest above superstition, find 
their best inspiration in the words of Christ ? It is because 
there are in his teachings the clearest reason, the most pen- 
etrative and abiding truth, because he himself saw this 
truth, and left it with us for the very ends of slow, undis- 
turbed, race-regeneration. 

Each departure from the simple sincerity of Christ 
begets new difficulties, and drives us back again to our 
first position. So has the criticism of the world found it 
hitherto. Christ as a fanatic is more unmanageable in 
thought than Christ the Son of God. The character of 
Christ as the slow creation of misled disciples is a greater 
wonder than Christ, a divine person. At each departure 
our forces are less adequate to the work assigned them, 
and that beauty is best explained in its enduring power by 
its divine spirit. We are thus left simply in the presence 
of great, proportionate, wonderful things, of wonderful 
origin ; we are not obliged to attribute them to blind fanat- 
icism, or low cunning, or superstition, entering always as 
a dry rot into character. We can more easily believe in 
the noble when left in its noble proportions, sources and 
services ; and this we find it good to do. The crude, mis- 
taken and insincere, neither help nor explain our picture. 
And thus only do we get revelation, salvation from it. 
On these conditions it ceases to be a mirage, and discloses 
redemptive and divine love, rests on our near horizon as 
the foreshadowing image of Heaven. 

If asked to push our analysis into the constitution of 
Christ, and separate again the human and divine elements, 
we may, as lacking sufficient data, wisely and consistently 
decline to do it. This doctrine of the divine nature of 
Christ, like that of the trinity, should be left flexible, as 
otherwise easily slipping into difficulties we need not have 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 433 

raised, and, having raised, have no means at hand to 
remove. Our wisdom lies in declining statements which 
narrow or trammel our faith, or transcend the conditions of 
proof; and in never imposing on others those passing con- 
ceptions which combine for us most easily our convictions. 
Whether' Christ, the God-man, found his limitations exclu- 
sively in the physical conditions of humanity, or farther in 
a distinct human personality ; whether he was the passing 
manifestation of one being, God, or the permanent, genetic 
union of two beings, God and man, are inquiries so purely 
speculative, that if we have a right to make them, we have 
no right to enforce our answers to them. The private 
economy of each man's thought admits much which can 
play no part in theology. That conception, half image, 
half deduction, is for us the best, which is the most sim- 
ple, flexible, undefined, and leaves us in the most imme- 
diate presence of God, waiting on a farther revelation 
rather than scrutinizing the method of the one already 
made. Christ, the Divine One, is as true to our feeling as 
the friend at our side, and his words as easily glide into 
our life. We would not banish him, then, by a conjecture 
as to his make-up, any more than we would discard our 
friend by an idealistic speculation as to his real being. 
We use our philosophy to gather, not to scatter our facts, 
our truths. We rule out the psychology of Christ as one 
of dogmatic statement, and restore it among those shifting 
conceptions which subserve their purpose, when left to be 
shaped by airy thoughts to the personal, intellectual ends 
which evoke them ; when carrying the mind forward with 
least contradiction to the essential truths of Revelation. 
It is not his constitution that Christ expounds, it is not 
to this that his instruction points. He asserts his divinity 
only as the guarantee of his authority as he proceeds to 
matters more nearly level with our wants. W T e may certainly 
19 



434 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

speculate as to the constitution of Christ, — nothing is pro- 
fane to a reverent spirit — and our theories are more or less 
admissible as they harmoniously embrace the human and 
divine, and lay no bonds of assertion on either in so new 
a relation. Sufficient and final these speculations can not 
be, pertaining as they do to facts quite beyond experience. 
The solution which presents the least difficulty to us is 
that which makes the Divine Soul, the Divine Life, the true 
life of Christ, and then accepts its manifestation under the 
limitations of a true incarnation. The narrow bounds of 
a human body, the bounds to acquisition, comprehension, 
action, implied in infantile life, passing by normal growth 
into manhood, impose the formal conditions under which 
the Divine Life expresses itself. It is the very problem 
of an incarnation that the Divine inflatus shall not over- 
pass or submerge these its bounds. The Divine is not to 
tear and shatter, like a demon, the human with which it 
allies itself; and this human is found in the relation of 
our physical and spiritual constitutions, inseparable from 
and defining each other. The form and the force of this 
new life are respectively human and divine. This allows 
us to suppose that the truths of science were no more 
instantly, persistently, before the mind of Christ, than were 
the facts of nature before his eyes. We must not in one 
breath grant and deny the restrictions of humanity because 
of the misty margin along which the two elements blend. 
We accept the human, we accept the Divine, both as real ; 
we know not how to compound them with precision ; we 
suspect the best image to be, a human soul with the largest 
inspiration of the Almighty. 

We now pass to the plainer inquiry, the purposes of 
this incarnation. Comprehensive as these are, we look 
upon them all as moral, vital, and in no sense formal. In 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 435 

Christ there are new forces, truths, affections introduced 
into our spiritual world, forces which work by their own 
efficiency, according to their own law, to their own ends. 
Christ works by what he was and is and did and said, and, 
like other living souls, carries his power with him, impart- 
ing intellectual comprehension and spiritual affinity. We 
exclude from the purposes of the incarnation all formal 
adjustments under the divine government, all make-shifts 
of law, all purely judicial ends. Christ, it seems to us, 
affects the state of men and alters their relation to God 
only as he alters them, and by vital, spiritual powers 
restores their thoughts, quickens their affections, and 
deepens and cleanses the fountains of spiritual life. No 
force is more independent, more self-sufficient, more con- 
ditioned to protracted activity and quiet growth than that 
which is contained in the words and works of Christ. No 
limitations are laid upon it by a law outside itself. The 
Word is God. 

We do not historically find any sufficient ground for 
the reference to Christ of a definite, judicial, vicarious 
work, a work turning on positive commands, governmental 
rewards and punishments, exigencies of restraint, and not 
on the normal conditions of good and evil under our moral 
constitution. We see no proof in history that it was a 
hitch in law in the restricted sense, an entanglement of 
penalties, that was removed by Christ ; but we are led to 
believe that it was a new, higher, more spiritual footing 
that was given us by him, to which there were incident new 
escapes from under the letter of law, new joys and freedom m 
in its spirit. 

The sacrifices of the Old Testament were methods of 
approach to God, of expression and instruction in worship, 
which owed their adoption in the Israelitish ritual to their 
general prevalence and intrinsic fitness. Israel was 



43^ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

trained under familiar forms by accepted, and so by com- 
prehensible methods. A ritual can not have a spiritual 
elevation alien to those who are subject to it. Its ideas 
and their expression must be deeply, historically, incorpo- 
rated into the conceptions of those who are to profit by it. 
Rites more than truths need a historic support. Sacri- 
fices came to the Israelites with their natural force and 
with acquired associations, and though varied and deeper 
meanings would be slowly added to them, the starting 
point of discipline would be found in the old and familiar 
use. Only thus do rites grow. There may be marked 
transitions from one religious culture to another, but there 
can be no leap, no breaking of the new with the old, no 
emancipation that removes the traces of previous servitude. 

The primary, the natural force of a sacrifice is that of 
a gift, a thing consecrated. This character it has equally 
and directly, whether it consists of animals slain at an 
altar or of the fruits of the field. A rendering of gifts to 
God, and so of worship to him, lies at the foundation of 
sacrifice as its first significance, and admits freely of that 
variety of offerings which belonged to the Jewish ritual. 
We have no reason to suppose that a bloody sacrifice 
would have in the outset any deeper meaning than one of 
fruits or grains. The sufferings of animals would hardly 
appeal to the feelings of rude herdsmen as a distinct ele- 
ment in the transaction, nor the taking of life be regarded 
as other than an ordinary, incidental circumstance. The 
gift of property would be the telling fact, and one con- 
trolled in its form by the possessions of the suppliant. 
Ideas of purification and appeasing, as associated with the 
shedding of blood, would be a later growth of symbolism. 

The conciliation of God or gods by sacrifice would 
follow directly on an apprehension of him as angry, and 
would at once accompany a fearful, sinful, superstitious 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 437 

and bewildered state, enveloped in the interpretations of 
human passion. This appeasing, failing to find a deep 
enough expression in gifts of fruits and sacrifice of ani- 
mals, by a natural sequence passed on to human sacrifices. 
The ease with which the Israelites fell into this prevalent 
rite, discloses its affinity with their thoughts, and their 
affinity with the nations about them. Human sacrifice 
would instantly tinge the altar with a deeper hue ; quite 
new ideas would gather about it, even when its thirsty 
stones were drenched with the blood of animals merely. 
Blood would have a more vigorous symbolism, one based 
on strong, though partially perverted, and misdirected 
feelings in the human heart. Justice and anger, law and 
passion, would blend together, and find a mixed symbolism 
and expression in sacrifice. 

Both of these ideas naturally inhering in sacrifice, or 
easily growing out of it ; first, of a simple gift to God, a 
grateful, worshipful, prayerful recognition of him ; second, 
of an appeasing, propitiating, atoning concession to him, 
finding its fullest utterance in human sacrifice, are alike 
partial, symbolic truths : not absolute, adequate ones. 
God needs no gifts at our hands, and he suffers no appeas- 
ing. The gift, and much more the cruel sacrifice, wrought 
in a coarse, rude, though suggestive, way, in minds 
obscure and passionate, confounding righteousness with 
roughly administered law. The simple gift is far better 
than the bloody infliction in that it is surrounded by fewer 
false lights, draws the heart quietly within the range of 
divine grace, with tender suggestion teaches God's true 
character, and can not so easily be marred by sordid, 
cruel and implacable passion. Yet it, no more than a 
bloody sacrifice, is an exact measure of an exact truth. 
The latter has this advantage, — the sacrifice of animals 
perchance with the shadow of human sacrifice on it — that 



43$ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

it lays hold in a bolder, stronger way of the wicked heart, 
has in it more stirring suggestions of real, urgent dangers, 
and expresses in a partial and deceptive, yet in an effec- 
tive form, those attributes of God which lie back of right- 
eousness, forever repellant of sin, and hostile to it. An 
attitude toward God, quite in advance of ordinary, savage 
indifference, would be induced by a ritual of sacrifices, 
permeated with both ideas, that of gift and that of pro- 
pitiation. Yet both views, and the second more than the 
first, would require constant spiritualizing, the reduction 
of the sanguine hues of passion, and their replacement by 
the kinder coloring of grace ; that turning of the remote, 
coarse and symbolical into the near, subtile and real, for 
the sake of which alone the ritual is instituted. To bring 
out more and more, in a bald, logical way, the . form of 
relation found in the sacrifices themselves as facts ; to 
drop into rather than off from the barren rendering of 
barren natures and times, is to pervert the whole Jewish 
ritual, is to do what the Pharisee did, and what the dog- 
matist is ever doing. The sacrifices were dissolving spir- 
itual truths, designed to give place by perpetual change to 
other deeper, fuller truths ; they were not stern, rugged 
outlines to be slowly filled in as the very frame-work of 
faith. To lay hold of the propitiatory feature, to distend 
it by simple inflation into a precise legal fact, is to com- 
pute the symbol at its point of greatest aberration, is to 
accept the worst light that human passion had reflected 
upon it; and to analyze it into its judicial elements, is to 
make Heaven do on the side of justice what human wick- 
edness had done on the side of passion, pushing the inno- 
cent forward into the place of the guilty, shedding the 
blood of the pure to wash away the stains of sinners. 
This transfer of the bloody act from the realm of blind, 
superstitious, cruel fear to that of clear-eyed justice is not 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 439 

sufficient to alter its character. The symbol is still weak, 
faltering and false. It is not till we translate the altar 
language into a true spiritual dialect that we reach its 
significance, understand moral cleansing, moral burden- 
bearing, moral sacrifice. 

In harmony with this view is the attitude of the 
prophets toward sacrifices, when, in the hands of a hard- 
featured, oppressive priesthood, they were settling down 
into a severe, self-sufficing ritual. " When ye come to 
appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to 
tread my courts ? Bring no more vain oblations ; incense 
is an abomination unto me ; the new moon and Sabbaths, 
the calling of assemblies I cannot away with ; it is iniquity, 
even the solemn meeting. Your new-moons and your 
appointed feasts my soul hateth ; they are a trouble unto 
me, I am weary to bear them."* 

If the sacrifice always retained a precise typical value, 
as a rehearsal of the central fact in the divine government ; 
if it bore both a prophetic and a judicial aspect, this lan- 
guage is certainly not as fitting, as if its efficiency was 
confined to its moral power. These attacks on the Jewish 
ritual, these efforts to return to a higher and more flexible 
rendering, are natural and inevitable, if the prophets 
regarded sacrifices as a method of worship, partial and 
suggestive, and of value only as they gave way easily 
before the truth. 

We come here, as we must often come, to the conclu- 
sion, that there are no sufficient, final statements of spir- 
itual truths ; that these truths are like the sun seen 
remotely, seen through an intercepting medium, seen by 
eyes partially blinded by its light, and so inadequately 
seen, and ever waiting to be better seen, seen under ad- 
vantages of insight gained by our progress. Those are 
* Is. i, 13, compare Mi. 6, 6. 



44° A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

most to be dreaded in religion, as in science, who will not 
accept the flow of living things, who will not let the present 
and the past slip easily from under them that they may 
safely reach the future ; but must needs plant themselves, 
set up their bounds, and make a Canaan of any ground 
they chance to occupy. We are in a most profound spir- 
itual sense pilgrims in the world of thought. Nothing is 
good save as it leads to that which is better, and a thou- 
sand things are good on the side of their upward depen- 
dence. 

While the sacrificial ritual of the Jews was truly reli- 
gious in guiding the Israelites to a cheerful, worshipful 
rendering again to God of the things received from him, 
in suggesting the unyielding claims of obedience, and the 
heavy penalties of disobedience, it gathered, traveling 
along this line of central instruction, many secondary 
powers of expression. The blood, as representing the 
inscrutable life of the animal, and, as sacrificed at the 
altar, a life consecrated to God, gained, in natural sym- 
bolism a consecrating and so a spiritually cleansing power. 
The sprinkled blood brought the person or the thing — and 
as often the thing as the person — into a like state of con- 
secration. That there is here only spiritual speech, a 
pure symbol, we are taught when it is said, " It is not pos- 
sible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take 
away sins ; " and the breadth of its suggestion, of its inte- 
rior truth, we are taught, when, in the same connection, it 
is said of Christ, " For by one offering he hath perfected 
forever them that are sanctified."* There is here in the 
sacrifice of Christ no altar, no high-priest, no sprinkling 
with blood, but simply the fellowship of life with life, of 
life with life in an act of truly sacrificial consecration to 
God, and thus the actual, spiritual impartation of that 
* Heb. io, 4. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. ' 44 1 

devoted life of which the blood of the altar was but a 
remote symbol. By a like bold, subtile, suggestive sym- 
bolism we take up our crosses and follow after Christ ; we 
are crucified with him, and we rise with him. The safety 
and force of this and kindred language are found in keep- 
ing aloof from the letter, and catching decisively at the 
spirit. We draw back from the painting till we reach the 
position in reference to which the colors were laid on ; a 
scrutiny of the canvas close at hand confounds and mis- 
leads us. The ritual of the Old Testament, rightly- 
viewed, will guide us, as it was intended to guide the 
Israelites, into a freer, deeper rendering of our relations to 
God. We shall not gain precision at the expense of 
breadth, exactness by a loss of insight, nor a narrow logi- 
cal coherence at the cost of spiritual affections. The 
mind, when it has spun a fine, close web of inferences, 
yields them with reluctance, looks upon the truer solutions 
of our spiritual life as vague and uncertain, and enters on 
new liberties and new responsibilities with fear rather than 
hope. 

The conclusions we reach from the Israelitish ritual 
are these: Its sacrifices were at once natural and familiar 
methods of worship, discipline and instruction. A variety 
of ideas attended upon them, and other ideas were capable 
of easy development from them. • Among these was the 
notion of propitiation, the appeasing of an angry God; 
expressed on the side of law, the placating of a just God ; 
as still farther softened, the enabling of God to forgive 
without the loss of government. This notion of propitia- 
tion, in every phase of it, from human sacrifice downward, 
fails to be an exact truth, and yet has under it a certain 
symbolic force and moral power. It is a beam of light 
refracted in the atmosphere of human passion ; it is the 
blood-red sun that hangs on the horizon shaded, misplaced 

IQ* 



442 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

and dyed by earthly vapors. The sacrifices, in any exact 
language we give them, are inadequate symbols, quite fail- 
ing to interpret our true dependencies on God. They sub- 
serve their purpose best, when we accept every hint, and 
bind ourselves to none. As long as sin is to be intimidated, 
justice must be in the foreground, and a justice that, in 
its apprehension, suffering the distortions of human 
thought, will become a bloody, exacting attribute. The 
symbolic sacrifice will, therefore, in this direction deepen 
its hue, and while subserving a truly moral purpose, be 
capable of easy and permanent perversion. The search 
for any exact, formal scheme of salvation, as instituted and 
announced in these sacrifices, in which infliction should 
stand for infliction, is a fruitless moiling into the symbol, 
rather than a rising through it into the profound truths 
which it expresses and hides. 

That the language of the altar is to be kept thus pliant 
and expansive is indicated not only as in harmony with a 
vigorous rendering of every method of religious instruction, 
but also by the variety in the Jewish ceremonial, by its 
intermixture, its blending together of sacrifices a portion 
of which allow of no vicarious rendering, and by the free- 
dom with which the same language is applied in different 
cases in the relation of things as of persons to God. Thus 
an atonement was said^to be made by the high-priest for 
the altar, the tabernacle, and the holy place, as well as for 
himself and the congregation. In the passage in the 
Hebrews, a portion of which is so frequently urged to 
enforce a strictly vicarious view, things are freely included 
with persons, and we are not at liberty to adopt a solution 
too strict for either of them. " Moreover he sprinkled 
with blood both the tabernacle and all the vessels of 
the ministry. And almost all things are by the law purged 
with blood ; and without shedding of blood is no remission. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 443 

It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in 
the heavens should be purified with these ; but the heav- 
enly things themselves with better sacrifices than these."* 
This remission, this purification, must be of such a nature 
that it could have a direct, symbolic application to an 
altar as to a person, it can not, then, be strictly vicarious. 
The looseness of the symbol will not allow it to be formu- 
lated in this way. The imagery is less exact but far more 
inclusive than the interpretation. The holy things and 
places vaguely image the things of heaven, and Christ is 
at once high-priest and sacrifice. Many of the features of 
the symbol are only partially appropriate, and some have 
no significance, so easy, bold and airy is the motion of the 
thought. Yet the one truth is clear above all, we stand 
with Christ, he is our high-priest, our approach unto God 
is with and by him. 

Nor do we any more find a historical support for a 
formal, vicarious atonement in the circumstances which 
attended the death of Christ. Nothing could be more 
unjudicial, out of the range and observation of positive, 
divine law, more in defiance of it, than the crucifixion of 
Christ. On what ground is a new outbreak of sin like 
this, a wanton cruelty in renewed oversight of the divine 
will, to be taken up into the tribunal of Heaven, pro- 
nounced a part of its own procedure and made the neces- 
sary condition of a formal pardon ? The parties to this 
infliction, this punishment, if we must so regard it, under 
positive law are not those who have the administration of 
that law, but criminals under it. The sentence is that of 
a Roman court and the Jewish Sanhedrim. The condem- 
nation is a new crime, not a solemn, judicial act before the 
firm seat of Divine Justice. An attentive spectator would 
have thought that perfect law, complete justice, had suf- 
* Heb. ix, 21. 



444 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

fered fresh overthrow. The agents in this action are a 
Roman soldiery and a city rabble, uniting law and lawless- 
ness, tyranny and riotousness, in one composite act of sin. 
Nothing could be more foreign to the outstanding features 
of this transaction than the assertion, that it represents 
divkie justice in its quiet, exact fulfillment. This sub- 
sumption of the violence, the frenzy, of human wickedness 
as a divine, judicial process is most strange, calls for the 
most explicit assertion, and clear explanation. We have 
always been greatly surprised that this incongruity has not 
been more generally felt. We see not why, on the same 
principle, any act of violence, directed toward a good man, 
might not, to the extent of its value as suffering — and all 
suffering should have a legal value — be taken into the 
divine scheme, and there be economized as an offset 
against the penal roll. That the transaction at the* time 
bore no judicial character, looked to no such issue, could 
not be admitted as an objection, for the crucifixion of 
Christ was removed in its circumstances as far as any act 
could be from the appearance of righteousness. It is cer- 
tainly an astonishing judicial manipulation by which the 
greatest sin is turned into the one only remedy of sin, its 
supreme legal infliction. In the parable of the husband- 
men, illustrative of the relation of men to God and to 
Christ, it would seem as if the violence by which the son 
and heir was cast out and slain should have been the com- 
pletion of a redemptive process, and not merely the prov- 
ocation to final retribution. The most significant feature 
in the death of Christ finds no recognition in that parable. 
That which is sin to the perpetrators, to wit, the crucifixion 
of Christ, is to be to them salvation, — and was doubtless 
to some of them — and, under this vicarious theory, not as 
a sin repented of, but as a real transaction with a legal 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 445 

value. How could one repent of that which to him and 
others was the ordinary method of salvation ? 

It does not suffice to say, that strict judicial features 
and forms are secondary ; that it is open to the divine gov- 
ernment to dispense with them and to take into its coun- 
sels, as passive agents, any parties. We have started out 
on a strictly judicial claim, a formal, governmental exigency. 
The necessity of the atonement has been made to rest on 
judgments, and so judicial processes can not in the same 
transaction be honored and utterly set aside. If a lesson 
of exact justice is to be taught, it must be taught in an 
exact way, and be in keeping throughout. It is of the 
very nature of legal, judicial transactions to be judicial and 
legal, and in vitiating the form we vitiate the substance. 
The difference between Lynch-law and law may be only 
one of form. It is not enough that the murderer be hung, 
he must be hung by the officer of the law. The second 
item is as essential as the first. It is of the nature of law 
to be particular, it is of the nature of justice under a 
vicarious scheme to be particular, and if we invoke law 
and justice we too must be particular and abide by them. 
Removing one foot from the law, the other slips off it 
also. It is impossible to honor the justice of Heaven in a 
transaction like that of Calvary. 

Not merely in the forms and agents of the events do 
we miss all penal features, but also in the sufferings of the 
victim. Those sufferings were physical and spiritual. The 
physical sufferings alone were a direct infliction, the spirit- 
ual sufferings were incident to a holy nature under spirit- 
ual law. No great judicial weight can be assigned the 
bodily sufferings of Christ by a tribunal settling infinite 
rewards and punishments for a countless multitude ; while 
his mental sufferings, his compassion, his yearning desire, 
his clinging love to men are really the sanctity, the hap- 



446 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

piness of his holy and divine nature ; that of which he 
could not and would not for a moment have been divested. 
This compassion is not punishment, it is barely pain, it is 
the redemptive power of a pure soul. Spiritual suffering 
is, in a deeper sense, joy and life, and, in the form of ten- 
der love and yearning trust, can by no means be called an 
infliction. If any thing in the agony of the garden or of 
the cross be attributed to the anger of God, we must feel 
that this anger is a pure figment, a misty fiction, begotten 
of the doctrine, not sustaining it ; and this whether we 
look at the narrative or at the nature of the case. The 
words, " My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me," 
are a familiar outcry of a spirit wrestling with itself, being 
shaken at its hold of faith by an internal struggle. Vica- 
rious anger, vicarious in its object, and vicariously felt, is 
an absurdity, a piece of moral mechanism, the like of which 
we find nowhere in human experience, and for which we 
discover no ground or occasion in the moral sense. We 
are wrenched by our own sins, we are cast down in com- 
passion by the sins of others, we may be disturbed by the 
mistaken anger of another directed toward us for supposed 
complicity in transgression, we never feel guilty of another's 
sin, we are never distressed by a pure, holy eye resting on 
our tender sympathies, nor can such an eye otherwise than 
compassionate them. There is no ground for the anger 
of God against Christ, and we can not evoke it by a fiction. 
Truth is too powerful for us. The agony of the garden 
finds its explanation, filling it with moral force and living 
power, in the tender compassionateness, the eager, yearn- 
ing love of Christ, forced back, baffled, and rebuffed by 
the contradiction of sinners. Its secret and deep fountains 
were those of the spiritual affections. A soul so strug- 
gling may seem to itself forsaken, but is not forsaken. 
The want of a historical basis for a strictly vicarious 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 447 

atonement is also seen in the absence of any facts in 
human history which can be brought forward for its illus- 
tration and enforcement. The principle involved has not 
been taken up in our historic experience. There is one 
stock example, that of Zalucus, the Locrian ; and with 
this cunning, affectionate, stupid act of a remote, dark era 
the light of comparison expires — the torch of experience 
goes out. A doctrine which should receive its significance 
from oft-returning moral transactions catches its exposition 
from this uncertain rush-light shining in a dark age. 

The moral power of the judicial act by which the 
father consented to the loss of an eye in order to redeem 
one of his son's eyes, who, by an act of adultery, had for- 
feited both, is found in its affection ; its governmental 
force, in the sense of certainty imparted to the threatened 
punishment, since the ruler had spared neither himself nor 
his son ; its sagacity, in this substitution of one thing for 
another, with such love and self-denial that none could 
carp at it ; and its stupidity, in supposing, if the king did 
suppose, that this ingenious evasion was a legitimate, 
judicial transaction, that it rested on a principle which 
could find recognition in wise government, that a second 
criminal could be allowed to bring forward any two human 
eyes for extinction, that what the law demanded was eyes, 
not the eyes of adulterers. 

This doctrine shows also its destitution of a historic 
basis by its method of growth. It is plain that the early 
and the patristic church had not defined the work of Christ 
on its legal, justiciable side. Views of his work were pre- 
valent quite in conflict with its vicarious character, and 
resting on the figure of a ransom. The patristic writers 
must be closely searched to find any clear recognition of 
a vicarious sacrifice. Not till we reach the scholastic age 
do the ideas of justice and veracity, the exigencies of 



44-8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

righteousness and of a righteous government, giving occa- 
sion for a vicarious punishment, come prominently forward. 
From Anselm onward to the Reformation, and the full 
unfolding of Calvinism, these conceptions gained a more 
and more severe, logical statement. This doctrinal devel- 
opment, late and partial, almost personal — to such a 
degree was it the fruit of a few leading, speculative minds 
— has all along been attended with spirited dissent. From 
the Reformation to the present time, while there have been 
firm nuclei in the Protestant Church, holding to the vica- 
rious theory in its rigid consistency, there has also been a 
growing tendency to soften the doctrine, till we now have 
every phase of acceptance and denial. In this develop- 
ment, we fail to see the traces of fundamental, historic 
truth. For a long and vigorous period the doctrine is not 
a prevalent, efficient element of faith. If present at all, 
it is so in so obscure a form as not to be consciously real- 
ized by those who hold it. Yet the belief, if true, must 
always and equally have been, as a fact, a necessity of sal- 
vation, and, as a doctrine, a fundamental point in religious 
instruction. 

In an age peculiarly logical, mechanical, subtile in its 
conceptions, the theory is brought clearly forward, having 
hitherto hardly played so conspicuous a part as the notion 
of a ransom paid to the devil, and in a metaphysical, 
analytical way elaborated into a complete coherent scheme. 
Under a rigid yet inconsistent rendering of the idea of 
justice, the sufferings of Christ are made penal. As a 
conclusion plainly akin to this, the obedience of Christ 
becomes, to a cold and fruitless logic, a fund of merit, 
capable, by imputation, of distribution to the saints, even 
as his sufferings had stood them in stead of punishment. 
Such scholiums of the theory as a limited atonement and 
an exact transfer of merits and demerits between man and 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 449 

man, action and action, made their appearance. The last, 
in its logical outcome as a doctrine of indulgences, issued 
in the grossest wickedness. 

This theory, then, as the growth of a barren, logical 
process; as held with shifting and conflicting statements; 
as expounded in every variety of way, on every variety of 
principle ; as giving rise to monstrous and immoral con- 
clusions ; as being the product of a few minds, and accom- 
panied from the outset with more or less dissent ; as first 
slowly passing forward to an extreme statement, and then 
as steadily declining from it, shows no sufficient hold on 
the Christian conscience, and is not able to vindicate for 
itself a place among historic truths. A doctrine that starts 
out with an exact justice and ends in quasi justice, that 
pushes a precise claim and meets it at length with an 
expressional payment ; a doctrine, that following its con- 
clusions freely, issues in gross immorality, or, proceeding 
more cautiously, has, at length, nothing left but equivalent 
expressions, judicial indications, of the divine mind : a 
doctrine preeminently one of logic, yet whose threads of 
thought are always tangling, and spun from a half dozen 
independent and opposed points, claims nothing from us 
on its inspired or its historic side. 

It also fails to root itself among permanent moral 
truths, because, as a moral force, it has been outstripped 
by sporadic development outside of Christianity. This 
argument is capable of large expansion ; we shall barely 
state it, and illustrate it by single examples. If the moral 
nature of man once gets beyond the vicarious idea, that 
nature will return to it very reluctantly even though it be 
enforced by Christianity. Spiritual liberty is not easily 
yielded, nor the sense of a free and purely spiritual footing 
before God. Every mind, therefore, which has gotten hold 
of the notion of Deity, as a spiritual power dealing spirit- 



450 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ually with men, will not, can not, readily take up again 
the trammels of formal processes and judicial exigencies. 
" Every Hellene may offer sacrifice and prayer without any 
stranger's mediation,"* was the best Grecian temper, while 
the Jews were still bound close to a ritual. Sophocles, in 
his CEdipus at Colonus, says, 

" For one soul working in the strength of love 
Is mightier than ten thousand to atone, "f 

Here is an atonement on its spiritual footing, and one 
which the soul can not yield. 

Our second leading objection to any strictly vicarious 
element in the sufferings of Christ is, that its recognition 
is at war with the first principles of ethics, and so mis- 
leads and perverts the moral sense. It is a postulate 
with us that the moral constitution of man must be and is 
the foundation of religion, that nothing is truly religious 
that is not truly ethical, and that the activity of our spirit- 
ual nature is found in the free interplay of religious truths 
and moral perceptions. We have already seen that the 
great facts of religion, as the being of God, admit of no 
proof aside from our moral constitution, and that, once 
established, they derive their entire spiritual significance 
from that nature. Religion simply offers new facts to the 
ethical intuitions, judgments and affections, and, by virtue 
of them, these enter on a new activity, in a clearer, more 
enduring, and gladdening life. The centre of our moral 
nature is conscience, an intuitive discernment and enforce- 
ment of right, an enforcement which can proceed alone 
under a recognition of the power of choice. It is an axiom 
in ethics that responsibility is commensurate with power. 
An action is disclosed in its moral quality by the light 

* Curtius' His. of Greece, vol. 2, p. 3. 

f The Tragedies of Sophocles, by J. C. Louttrall, p. 89. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 45 I 

which conscience throws upon it ; and its personal bearing, 
as one of sin or righteousness, is determined by its coming 
directly or indirectly within the scope v of choice. If we 
pass in the least from these first principles of our moral 
constitution in our theology, that theology becomes, to the 
degree of this departure, a perplexity, a tyranny and a 
superstition, a check and not a means to rational develop- 
ment. From these first axiomatic truths it follows at once 
that moral character is incommunicable, that guilt has no 
existence aside from the moral nature of the guilty person, 
and righteousness no home save in the loving thoughts of 
him who entertains it in his action. Guilt and righteous- 
ness are abstractions, not entities, the moment they are 
separated from that personal activity by virtue of which 
they exist. 

But if these qualities of action are incapable of transfer, 
so are the penalties and rewards which are attached to 
them, or turn upon them. The chief element in these 
sanctions is the self-executing force of moral ideas, of the 
moral states incident to moral action, the rebuke and 
approval of conscience, the pain and the pleasure nestling 
in the soul itself, the strife and the peace, the disappoint- 
ments and the fulfillments, of the daily life. All exterior 
sufferings and enjoyments derive their moral character, so 
far as they have one, from this internal state ; conditioned 
on this, they are moral, divorced from it, they are like a 
broken limb, or a purse picked up in the street, accidents 
of being. Nothing, therefore, is so immoral, that is, not 
moral, as the separation of pain and pleasure from the 
moral states they accompany. To shelter a man at heart 
wicked, to make him happy, to give him conditions of 
good permanently in advance of his moral state, is to strike 
a malicious stroke at the moral nature, since such a sepa- 
ration can only be accomplished by a measurable over- 



45 2 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

throw of that nature, by a sensible reduction of its com- 
mand of good and evil. This is the exact thing that sin 
is always striving to do, and its opposite the explicit dec- 
laration of the government which the moral nature is ever 
setting up in the world. If the penalties of sin could be 
separated from the sinner, if the rewards of righteousness 
could be shared by others than the righteous, if inner states 
could cease to be the controlling forces over external con- 
ditions, and this in the government of God, and under his 
scheme of salvation, the ethical confusion and overthrow 
of such a fact would be complete and hopeless. Indeed, 
the appearance of some such thing in this world, a partial 
separation of internal and external good incident to forces 
just getting under way, is the grand perplexity of God's 
present government, and this perplexity it is which a 
scheme of substitutes, in so far as it is one of substitution, 
reduces to a system, and carries forward as a permanent 
principle. That is to say, this theology exactly contra- 
venes the work of God in the world, that clearing away 
of moral confusion, that separation of good from evil, that 
development of the affinities of good with good, of evil 
with evil, which engage him ; character with each lapsing 
year and generation asserting a larger control over happi- 
ness. It is apparently the purpose of God to make clear 
and undeniable the intrinsic dependence of enjoyment on 
righteousness. " The soul that sinneth it shall die." It is 
the drift of a scheme of vicarious redemption to recognize 
and provide for the separation between righteousness and its 
rewards. But this thing is impossible. The moral nature 
never yields its condemnation except on repentance, and 
repentance can not fail to soften its censure, and ultimately 
extract its pain. Whatever shifting of suffering there may 
be in government aside from the decrees of the moral 
nature, will be purely of a formal and non-ethical nature. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 453 

One may stumble into a trespass, but because he stumbled 
into it, it is not a sin ; he may have involved himself in a 
penalty disproportioned to his fault, such a penalty becomes 
to him an outlying pitfall, a mishap, which must be endured 
in its dangers, but which gets no purchase on the moral 
nature. If the government of God has penalties of this 
sort, to be tossed from hand to hand in substitution, they 
are purely police regulations with no moral rendering, no 
moral significance. A vicarious scheme may not allow 
itself to be gotten in motion without repentance, that is, 
without the cover and approval of the moral nature ; but 
so far as it is vicarious, it does this thing, it separates 
between character and happiness, and is open to our 
impeachment. If there is no such division, then there is 
no possible substitution. Such a scheme must look upon 
the relation of sin and suffering, righteousness and peace, 
as in a measure arbitrary, and capable of being satisfac- 
torily reversed. A separation of this sort of the fruits of 
sin from sin itself, we regard as a conclusion in deepest 
conflict with our moral nature, and sure to lead, when 
logically expanded, to works of supererogation, imputed 
righteousness, the merits of the saints, indulgences. If 
one may escape the moral penalty of a sin his own, he may 
enjoy the moral rewards of righteous acts not his own. So 
far as God's government should recognize such a shifting 
of relations, it would become non-ethical, and indirectly at 
war with ethical principles. 

A belief in the strictly vicarious sufferings of Christ is 
also in conflict with our moral constitution, because it rests 
on fictitious moral powers or states. The principles 
which are brought forward to sustain a vicarious sacrifice 
are various, and, as they largely exclude each other, they 
are so far, taken together, self-destructive. Moral state- 
ments that give prominence to different considerations, but 



454 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

admit also those urged by each, confirm one another ; 
those theories whose constructive processes are preceded 
by destructive ones, being at war with each other, show 
that the central truth is missed by all. 

A moral power on which a vicarious atonement is very 
generally made to rest is a sense of justice. If pure justice 
is to be a sufficient support for the theory, we must mean 
by it an absolute demand instituted by our moral nature 
that all transgression shall suffer a proportionate punish- 
ment, an eternal ethical claim that the sins and the penal- 
ties which pertain to them shall not be separated. If we 
were to understand by this sense of justice the indissolu- 
ble connection which is slowly evolved under our moral 
nature between virtue and happiness, vice and misery, we 
should quite assent to it. No such thing is intended. The 
well-nigh contradictory idea is meant that under positive 
law a certain infliction must follow a certain transgression, 
and that justice will not allow this penalty to be freely 
remitted. That is, God may ordain punishment, but the 
punishment ordained escapes, under a moral principle, 
farther control on the part of the authority that has itself 
established it. That there is in our moral nature any 
impulse demanding, without reference to results, positive 
infliction ; or forbidding the remitting of punishment, we 
simply deny. The case is evident. A strictly vicarious 
theory, much as it needs such a principle in setting out, 
can not, in the progress of its exposition, abide by it. Its 
central fact, that of substitution, is at war with it. In place 
of inseparable punishment is put a separable one ; in place 
of a guilty party an innocent one. Exact justice, instead 
of remaining an absolute, moral impulse, becomes an 
appetite, an indiscriminate claim for suffering; and, indif- 
ferent to the parties who afford it as guilty or otherwise, 
becomes an ethical cannibalism, fed on the lives of its own 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 455 

servants. This view of justice, as applied to a vicarious 
sacrifice, no sooner gives the grounds for a substitution, 
than it again destroys them. If it indeed compels pun- 
ishment, it is certainly the punishment of the guilty. 
Neither the principle, nor the conclusions made to hinge 
on it, are admissible. The weakness of the principle is 
seen in the inability of this absolute justice to define a 
single penalty. The punishment which with fitness falls 
to each act of sin, it has no method of determining, till it 
introduces some farther end to be reached by the penalty. 
There is no direct proportion between a given sin and a 
given pain. They are united only by a rational purpose 
which the pain is to subserve. Pain and guilt are incom- 
mensurable terms. The advocate of absolute justice may 
even be found to escape this dilemma by the assertion, 
that every sin deserves infinite punishment, while the sac- 
rifice of Christ is possessed of infinite atoning merit. 
Thus, by a jugglery of words, legal equivalents are swept 
away, and the initiatory principle of exact justice lost sight 
of. There is nothing but confusion in the assertion of 
inexorable justice ; the purely moral penalty is softened at 
once by repentance, the purely positive penalty may be 
modified by the authority that establishes it, for reasons 
the equivalents of those for which it was set up. Nothing 
can possibly hinder this ; substitution would itself be an 
example of it. 

The word justice is primarily applicable to positive law, 
and expresses its fitness, and the fitness of its sanctions. 
Such laws afford grounds of comparison. They have a 
purpose, and may be judged by it, by their power to reach 
it, and the adaptation of their penalties to it. Each pun- 
ishment stands also in a relation of greater or less with 
every other punishment, coordinate with it in the ends 
sought. But positive law in thus defining justice, in defin- 



456 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ing righteous penalties as fitting, proportionate punishments 
in securing righteous ends, does not make that justice 
absolute, but the reverse. It has force only so far as the 
ends of legislation impart force. The moment these 
relax, justice relaxes. The quality of fitness can not go 
beyond the conditions which sustain it. 

But God's government is not primarily one of positive 
law, and does not, therefore, have even the rigidity which 
attaches to commands. The positive rules of religion are 
of little account save as they lead to pure morality, and 
bring the soul back to this standard ; save as they lead 
ultimately to insight, and put the soul in possession of its 
own spiritual powers, and under their inherent authority. 
The ritual rule must guide upward, and the moral principle, 
sinking for a moment to a precept whose force is in the 
ictus of-the voice that pronounces it, must rise again to its 
own elevation, and be left, as the soul progresses, to its 
inherent truth, to the energy which fell to it, not when 
inspiration re-uttered it, but when God accentuated it as a 
fundamental law in spiritual life. Positive authority thus 
plays a very transient, secondary part in God's government, 
and leaves to justice, in its primary application, a very 
subordinate service. 

The inwrought moral government of God, that which 
is in us, in society, in the world ; that which follows us 
wherever we are, and every instant strengthens its hold 
upon us ; that which springs up in every change of our 
condition as yielding its controlling features ; that which is 
in our lives, and not a condition alien to them, greatly 
modifies the notion of justice in modifying that of law. As 
the emphasis of law is no longer in him who announces it, 
but in the very constitution of him who receives it, so 
justice is not found in a fixed connection between dis- 
obedience and punishment,* a connection sustained by a 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 457 

lawgiver, but in the inevitable, inherent relation of sin and 
suffering. 

This relation existing in full force as the central fact 
of our moral constitution, shades off into dependencies 
less inherent as we pass outward. Sin as sin and because 
it is s n calls forth the rebuke of conscience, perverts the 
action and embitters the life of the soul. This is not a 
fact of outside ordination, but of innate constitution, of that 
order which is the essence of creation. The rebuke is not 
in all cases equally loud, the bitterness equally declared, 
but the one and the other proceed steadily to disclose 
themselves, and to bring on the entail of death. Without 
this central fact all inflictions are merely so many discom- 
forts. But sin as sin works its way into our intellectual, 
our moral, our physical natures, disturbs their harmony, 
inverts their laws, distorts their action, and plucks down 
new mischiefs at every step, punishments held in reserve 
by the forces dealt with, by the divine constitution of the 
soul, of society, of physical life. 

Moreover, God's creation, by virtue of the harmony 
which is in part incident to its physical and spiritual inter- 
dependencies, and in part preparatory to the extension of 
those dependencies, immediately catches up and echoes 
backward and forward the sentence of moral reprobation, 
till the air is everywhere full of it, as of scorching heat or 
stinging cold, and the soul finds no escape. 

These inwrought punishments admit of no substitution, 
but they do admit, in various degrees, more immediately 
or more remotely, of amelioration. The soul is purged 
and purified by repentance, and corrected action begins at 
once to soften and lift the penalty. The core of it, the 
feeling of guilt and shame, though the seat of acute pain 
in the moment of repentance, quite alters its character, 
loses its bitterness, becomes regenerative,, and, as penalty, 
20 



45^ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

is slowly eliminated by living forces. The secondary 
results of sin in the intellect, in social and physical activity, 
are slowly reached and corrected by secondary causes, or, 
if not removed, are measurably robbed of their virus. 

We object to a vicarious atonement in its relation to 
our moral nature because it brings distortion and exag- 
geration to certain facts bf that nature, as those of justice 
and positive law, and reduces or hides other more funda- 
mental facts, those which pertain to the interior, intrinsic 
law of moral life, shame, guilt, rebuke, repentance, forgive- 
ness, encouragement. One of these, forgiveness, calls for 
the clearest recognition. Forgiveness is a fact, a most 
renovating, hopeful fact of our spiritual constitution. For- 
giveness puts us on a new footing with others, as penitence 
does with ourselves ; and the two gradually cancel sin, 
annul the past and redeem the future. Forgiveness can 
be indefinitely extended on purely moral grounds to those 
who sincerely seek it, while it and repentance plant new 
seeds of life. These are great facts of the moral nature, 
and any vicarious theory that obscures them, does an 
irreparable mischief. A clear, bold, reiterated affirmation 
of the spiritual laws of our life is what we need, as a means 
of planting ourselves upon them ; while a strict, vicarious 
sacrifice stands in no harmony with them. It distorts 
justice, is false to the inherent, redemptive force of our 
spiritual life, to the renewing power of repentance, to the 
cleansing love of forgiveness. Penalty has no such hold 
on the guilty soul as to call for an ab extra method of 
shaking it off. 

Failing to find this inexorable urgency of a legal claim 
in our moral nature as the grounds of penal punishment 
in Christ, some seek it in an exigency of veracity, occa- 
sioned by a direct assertion of God. It was needful, it is 
said, that God should do all that he could do to deter men 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 459 

from sin. He did deter them by an explicit threat of pun- 
ishment. This punishment he can not now, therefore, 
remit. On this supposition his method of evasion by 
transfer remains open, as a moral transaction, to the 
criticism already urged. But it suffices to deny the facts 
which give rise to the alleged exigency. There are no 
such positive declarations, such peremptory threats, embar- 
rassing the ordinary spiritual administration of God's king- 
dom. To give such an extension to the words of Scripture 
is quite unwarrantable. Most grave are the objections to 
these devices, these feebly sustained facts, which are 
assigned a potency sufficient to arrest the flow of moral 
law. God's government is thus made to entrap itself, to 
bring up in a corner ; and is compelled to do, even to the 
crucifixion of Christ, what free moral forces do not require 
to be done. Let us reject these fictions, and get back again 
to sufficient and eternal principles, before we lose the 
power to discern them. 

If the defenders of a vicarious sacrifice pass the inherent 
claims of justice, and rest their cause on the exigencies of 
government, the looser connections incident to moral influ- 
ence, they still pervert or miss the facts of our moral con- 
stitution, and so weaken its foundations. Urging no farther 
the radical objection, that no government, otherwise than 
by evasion and subterfuge, can admit the principle of 
vicarious punishment, finding as it does, no support in 
pure morality or in penal administration, there remain 
such discrepancies between the ends and the resources of 
human government and the divine government, that we 
should reason with caution from one to the other. Punish- 
ment may be administered with larger forgiveness, more 
flexibility, and purely personal adaptations by God than by 
man, because, in the divine government, the objects of pun- 
ishment may be more purely moral, more extended in time, 



460 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

less pressed by an exigency, and pursued with infinitely 
more insight and resources. The omniscience of God, 
protecting him from misapplied forgiveness, and abused 
kindness, his omnipotence, protecting him both from the 
fact and the appearance of weakness in his government, or 
the possibility of evasion, allow him to put each case on 
its own merits as man can not. Moreover, the instantaneous- 
ness of the protection which civil governments seek, the 
short periods at their disposal, and their limited means of 
restraint, compel them to crowd events, hurry punishments, 
and insist on inflictions in a way quite alien to the divine 
method. To closely liken the. two governments is to over- 
look the free, broad, inwrought, irresistible moral condi- 
tions which fall to the one, and the hasty, semi-physical 
ends, and the feeble, superficial means, which belong to 
the other. 

Human governments can not, because of their weak- 
ness, forgive on simple repentance. They have not suffi- 
cient insight to determine the nature of repentance, nor 
can they spare the restraints of fear, nor endure the sus- 
picion which may attach to their own strength. The crim- 
inal, on the other hand, is not dangerous to the govern- 
ment of God, nor God's strength doubtful, nor is he uncer- 
tain as to the grounds of procedure, nor is he crowded and 
coerced by police exigencies. His power rests securely 
on natural forces, which can not but press quietly forward 
to a complete fulfillment. 

A vicarious sacrifice can secure no justification save in 
a divine attribute, like justice, or in a governmental exigency, 
like that which forbids a ruler to retreat from a position 
once taken. Neither of these pleas belong to it, and it 
can not, therefore, subserve a purpose by way of a general 
expression of the mind of God, making an impression 
equivalent to the punishment of the guilty. That God 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 46 1 

forgives the guilty on repentance, that repentance is regen- 
erative in its nature, are the very truths that need to be 
made known. God's government can abide by its facts, 
and does not require the disguise of an expression. The 
criminality of sin is not found in its external punishment, 
in the penalty affixed, but in its nature ; and this guilty 
nature is best seen in its antagonism to love, and is best 
cleansed away by forgiveness. To refuse to forgive sin is 
not to hate sin as sin, but is to be willing to maintain it. 
to hold it and the sinner in eternal antagonism. This is 
what the wicked do with their enemies, not what the 
righteous do with offenders. When God's government 
rests on pure moral facts, it best discloses its moral qual- 
ities and is the highest expression of truth. The good 
man yearns to forgive, and will not be refused forgiveness 
save on moral grounds. Unless the grounds which forbid 
forgiveness to God are of this nature, they can not be made 
to rest on general influence, since general influence, to be 
wholesome, must repose on sound, moral impulses. There 
is no quasi morality with God, acts in themselves inadmis- 
sible, but possessed of an expressive, expository character. 
God's estimate of sin would be very badly put by an act 
unjustifiable in principle. Two things must be made out 
preliminary to a vicarious penalty, first, the necessity of 
the execution of the penalty ; second, the admissibility of 
substitution. Neither is shown. God's government admits 
forgiveness freely. It is the very triumph of a spiritual 
nature to forgive. Penal substitution is never admissible. 
It violates personality and pure morality, and so violates 
them as to break down their very character. The soul 
must bear its own guilt and can not bear another's. This 
method also disregards the very exigency or urgency of the 
government in behalf of which it is set up, and dismisses 
the criminal on repentance, when we have been told that 



462 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

he can not be thus let off. It thus opens as wide the door 
of escape as does forgiveness itself, and destroys any plea 
that has been set up in governmental safety or necessity. 
Hence all the practical result left to such a vicarious pun- 
ishment is some vague notion of impression, of quasi 
justice, of general effect; an influence, which, having no 
support in exact principles, is an illusion, and more and 
more disclosed as such by the progress of thought. This 
continual substitution of more general and vague language 
for more precise claims indicates that the mind is, in its 
explanations, eluding the insight of the moral sense and 
being driven from point to point. 

In this theology is contained a vital attack on our 
ethical constitution. A penalty exterior and positive in 
its character, something added to, and alien to, strictly 
moral sanctions is insisted on as the essential thing in 
God's government. That is to say, a pure moral govern- 
ment is not self-sufficing, but comes to nothing unless 
helped out, propped up, supplemented, by positive author- 
ity. This is as if one should say, Society owes its moral 
constitution to civil law, not civil law to its moral constitu- 
tion. Yet positive enactment in God's government is 
secondary, transient, leading the soul back to pure, spirit- 
ual law. This vicarious scheme allows God and man to 
be so embarrassed by the entanglements of positive law, 
as to be constrained to admit a penalty not only alien to 
the claims of pure morality, but so at war with them as to 
strike at the very life of the soul. If the sinner is punished, 
he spiritually perishes; if he is not punished, he can be 
saved. Salvation has not only slipped its moral basis, but 
is ready to be sacrificed to positive law. From this dilemma 
of its own making, government finds an escape by the 
immoral evasion of substitution. Can the cunning and 
stupidity of methods go farther ? 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 463 

This declaring the moral nature insufficient in itself, 
its penalties slight, and its rule a hopeless miscarriage, is 
a great, though a subtile, immorality. The attention is 
turned from the deep-seated government of God in the 
soul itself, and is directed to an external, scarcely moral, 
mechanism of rewards and punishment, calling for the 
entire skill and strength of heaven, even to the sacrifice of 
its Ruler, to run it. Forgiveness, a profound spiritual 
element, is not granted its appropriate power. If, in some 
sense God forgives, yet his forgiveness has no sweep, no 
range, no overruling power, amid the stern laws that 
uphold his throne. It can work no restitution, it must 
wait on a judicial process. This is to make life subor- 
dinate to mechanism, the thing done to the method of 
doing it. 

We close this second leading point, that a strictly 
vicarious atonement is at war with moral principles, with 
one more consideration ; its principal emphasis is laid on 
the escape from the penalty of sin, not on the escape from 
sin itself. If we were to concede the sacrifice of Christ to 
be vicarious, this element in it would still remain a very 
secondary one. The position it now receives is that 
which belongs to the mind of a criminal. He is chiefly 
interested in his enlargement. He takes admonition with 
a little impatience, and returns at once to the pardon, to 
the hour in which the bolts shall be drawn. The real 
exigency of his case lies in his bad temper, a heart open 
to crime. What agencies shall touch and regenerate this, 
shall cleanse this leprosy, and restore the flesh of child- 
hood ! This work well done, and doors are easily opened ; 
without this cleansing, it were well that they should remain 
closed. The view of the atonement under discussion 
devotes its subtilty and sharp reasoning to picking the 
locks of justice, and has but a remnant of zeal left for its 



464 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

appropriate work, the heart's regeneration under natural, 
spiritual forces. Or this work may be passed over entirely 
to a strictly supernatural agency, and morality, spiritual 
morality, the angel that waits at the right hand of God, 
stands by discarded, having nothing to do with the escape 
and restoration. Not till we turn our back on penalties, 
seeking the thing before us, the mark of the prize of our 
high calling in Christ Jesus, will they slip from us, like 
Christian's burden, finding its way into an open sepulchre, 
among things dead. Eager to evade punishment, we 
shall lose life; pursuing life, we shall escape punishment, 
hardly knowing when or how. The fear of infliction is an 
immoral, or at best a preliminary, feeling, and can never 
be made the central feature of salvation. A settled wish 
to escape the legitimate results of conduct, and secure 
position aside from action, places instead of states, is the 
one blind, criminal impulse of the sou]. 

It may be thought, these accusations are much too 
sweeping for the facts ; the doctrines attacked have been 
highly moral in their effects, and can, therefore, hardly 
have immoral bearings. The answer is triple. First, there 
are united with this vicarious principle, truths furnishing 
the strongest incentives to the spiritual life, and hence the 
results of this one element are hidden. Second, the 
moral conflicts, inconsistencies, involved in the doctrine 
itself, are by no means clearly traced out by those who 
hold it, and hence but a portion of the mischief logically 
due to it is actually suffered. Most confine the principle 
to one transaction, and so hem in the contagion of a false 
premise ; they miss its real relations, and give their doc- 
trine throughout a fictitious character. Third, there have 
been abundant bad results traceable to this doctrine. In 
the Catholic faith this principle has, at times, been sys- 
tematically applied to the subversion of morality. Luther, 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 465 

in turn, while sedulously restricting the fact of substitution 
to the sufferings of Christ, made available by faith, cast 
the most direct contempt on pure morals. . " A Christian 
can not, if he will, lose his salvation by any multitude or 
magnitude of sins, unless he ceases to believe. For no 
sins can damn him but unbelief alone. Everything else, 
provided his faith returns or stands fast in the Divine 
promise given in baptism, is absorbed in a moment by that 
faith." This assertion and similar ones led Martineau to 
say, " Luther, whose unscrupulous audacity never tires of 
forging phrases of opposite stamp by which he may put the 
brand of insult upon Morals, and burn characters of glory 
into the brow of Religion."* This antagonism, so utterly 
mistaken, between Morals and Religion, grew up, in the 
mind of Luther, with the doctrine of a vicarious relation 
in Christ. Constantly in Protestantism, a semi-theoretical 
hostility of the same kind, and the possibility of a practical 
divorce between faith and virtue, have been painfully 
observable. There has been occasion for the reproach of 
Morley. " There is no counting with certainty on the 
justice of men who are capable of fashioning and worship- 
ing an unjust Divinity; nor on their humanity, so long as 
they incorporate inhuman motives in their most sacred 
dogma ; nor in their reasonableness, while they rigorously 
decline to accept reason as a test of truth."f 

It thus becomes, with the coherence of cause and effect, 
a true assertion by Martineau, that " the tendency of a 
wholly j-^r-natural religion is to produce an mfra-natural 
morality." $ 

In the doctrine of the atonement, as often held, there 
has been especially stored up the unyielding temper, the 
shallow subterfuge, the irrational and immoral issue. The 

* Studies of Christianity, p. 335. 
f Rousseau, vol. 1, p. 228. % Ibid, p. 336. 

20* 



466 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

defenders of this doctrine, while missing this defect in 
their own tenets, have seen it in those of their co-laborers. 
The expressionalist discerns the logical and moral vice in 
the too rigorous premises of the precisionist, and the pre- 
cisionist perceives that there must be connections of 
thought kindred to his own in the dogma of the express- 
ionalist, or it becomes wholly vague and unfounded. 

Not only is a historic and moral basis wanting to vica- 
rious punishment, it has no sufficient religious support. It 
perverts religious facts, and hides their spiritual force. It 
distorts the character of God. If the unity of God were 
closely held, this doctrine could not easily find place. It 
would present the Deity as a flagellant, inflicting stripes 
on himself either for the ends of justice, or government, or 
expression. It is preposterous that any ends, either of 
control or instruction or pure principle, should be met by 
such a spectacle. It would sjiow a radical unreason in 
the constitution of things, that gratuitous pain should sub- 
serve these highest purposes. The drama, however, is 
greatly helped by assigning different parts to different per- 
sons in the Godhead. One can stand as Justice, another 
come forward as Grace ; and the conflict is overlooked. 
But there is none the less a rending of the divine unity. 
If God the Father can not forgive, neither can God the 
Son. If pure principle and worthy ends forbid it in the one 
case, they do in the other also. Nothing can relieve the 
one of any pressure, whether of justice, or of government, 
or of grace, which the other feels. There is no opportu- 
nity for divided counsel or action on real, inherent princi- 
ples. We must make the supposition of a purely formal 
hitch in government, to be gotten over by a trick of admin- 
istration, before we can assign parts, and recognize divided 
action. There can be no division of sentiment in sincere 
inflictions, and hence God conciliates himself by his own 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 467 

punishment, cancels his own law by accepting its penal- 
ties, restores his government, involved in a serious mis- 
carriage, by virtue of his omnipotence, carrying away the 
punishments which otherwise could have swept all his sub- 
jects into hell, and brought his kingdom to an end ; or 
rather left the smouldering embers of it an offence forever. 
Are there not here a feebleness of device, an awkwardness 
of execution that put the government of God beyond all par- 
allel in the perplexity of its details, and in its tragic issues. 
This view is unfaithful to religious facts, because it dis- 
turbs the real vicarious relations sustained to us by Christ, 
sets the crucifixion by itself, and cuts it off from all like- 
ness to the sympathetic spiritual dependencies by which 
we are united one to another. That we suffer for each 
other ; that we are closely interlocked through the entire 
range of our physical, social, spiritual powers; that we 
enter into the joys and griefs, the triumphs and defeats, of 
our fellows ; that the individual life and the common life 
are inseparable, can neither of them move forward in a 
distinct development, are facts never to be lost sight of, 
and they involve at every stage a general, vicarious ele- 
ment. That a like relation measurably exists between us 
and God, that he puts himself under the conditions of 
sympathy, patience and love, which our circumstances 
call for, are also facts of supreme moment in the obedi- 
ence, courage, devotion they call forth. The pure spiritual 
character and homogeneity of the dependencies between 
man and man, between men and God, constitute their life- 
giving moral element, define our duties, and teach us what 
we may look for from all high and holy natures. God 
works for us as we work for one another, and so, in turn, 
work for him. One common feeling pervades and appor- 
tions all effort. We make up what is behindhand in the 
sufferings of Christ. Put this vigorous moral principle, in 



468 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the case of Christ, under the limitation of a strictly vicari- 
ous sacrifice, and he is out of relation in his work with us. 
We can not share his chief labor, and that labor proceeds 
on another and more urgent principle than ours. A rigid 
law has found entrance, a justice that measures out pen- 
alties and will not abate claims, that buys and seils its 
inflictions, and keeps accounts. The free, living, variable 
moral interdependence that counts nothing exactly, that 
looks for much, that appeals boldly to generosity and love 
and spiritual service, disappears. We are put on distinct 
terms of favor, on a legal footing, with Christ; not so 
much as those who have been bought, as those who have 
been bought up, with a price. The relation in itself most 
blessed in which we are included with Christ, we can not, 
so interpreted, sympathetically enter into, nor ourselves 
sympathetically extend to others. The work of Christ 
stands as a spiritual anomaly, lacking the constitutional, 
normal hold on the heart of man which falls to spiritual 
love, accepting and fulfilling everywhere the conditions of 
fellowship. This impression is increased precisely in the 
degree in which we make the work of Christ, the work of 
God, to be done to God and for God. We are not drawn 
by it into a soul-stirring salvation of love, but are first 
saved, on grounds difficult of apprehension, and then 
urged to be grateful for a salvation so achieved. We are, 
at best saved by an act of love, and not in love. Indeed, 
the only way in which the work of Christ, so interpreted, 
can retain its divine power for us, is by our shutting our 
eyes to the alleged moral mechanism, and getting back to 
the love involved in a sacrifice, in some inscrutable way 
necessary ; that is, our salvation is found in excluding this 
theoretical presentation, and attending to the remnant of 
moral power present under it. The more closely we bring 
the work of Christ to a basis of ordinary spiritual fellow- 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 469 

ship, the more regeneratively it acts on our hearts as a 
living, familiar, imitable impulse. 

Here enters that wresting of the Scriptures which carries 
them over from a free and moral, to a definite and dog- 
matic, utterance. .There is no truth more central to social, 
spiritual development than this of our vicarious relation 
to each other. That the work of Christ, the brightest 
illustration of it, should find frequent exposition under it, 
an exposition always earnest, and dropping at times into 
language made cogent by the figurative energy of the 
altar, was natural and inevitable. This extreme, this 
hyperbolic, pressure is held in check, as a logical state- 
ment, by other figures conjointly preserving the one truth, 
while conjointly effacing each particular impression of it 
in its precise features. Exceedingly various is the imagery 
under which Christ and the work of Christ are presented. 
He is the Captain of our salvation, the destroyer of the 
devil ; our High-Priest ; the bread that came down from 
Heaven, the door of the fold, the foundation on which we 
are built, the uplifted symbol, like the serpent in the wilder- 
ness ; he is a ransom, a curse for us ; his blood is the seal 
of a new testament ; that whereby we are purchased, are 
redeemed ; that wherewith we are cleansed or sanctified ; 
his is the blood of propitiation and reconciliation.* If 
any one of these images is laid hold of as an exact, com- 
plete statement, the remainder become conflicting and 
misleading, but if they are allowed, one and all, under the 
general vicarious law of the moral world, to express different 
bearings of the work of Christ, then they each find place, 
and are held firmly together under the leading assertion, 

* Compare Math, xx, 28 ; xxvi, 28. Jno. iii, 14, 15 ; vi, 51 ; x, 9. 
Acts xx, 28. Rom. iii, 25. 1 Cor, iii, II. it Cor. v, 19. Eph. ii, 
20. Gal. iii. 13. Heb. ii chap ; ix, 12 ; xiii, 12. 1 Pe. i, 18, 19. 
Heb. xiii, 12. 



47° A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. ' 

" I deliver unto you first of all, that which I also received, 
how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scrip- 
tures."* A general truth admits of a variety of illustration, 
a precise judicial formula can not be departed from in lan- 
guage; it is a single statement, a minute object, to be kept 
carefully in the focus of the instrument, or we lose it 
altogether. 

What we asserted in morals is equally true of our 
estimate of the religious facts of the atonement. If the 
work of Christ is pushed forward as a judicial act, its true 
spiritual power is to a degree hidden ; the truth, the near- 
ness, the fellowship are concealed by this fearful, obtrud- 
ing, legal sanction. Such weighty outside issues are set- 
tled by it, are so its prime purpose, that its interior, spirit- 
ual power is quite incidental to their adjustment. We see 
God- through his justice. The image of his character is 
gathered and defined by the lens of law. We love Christ 
because of the sacrifice he has made for us ; we are saved 
by the new, external conditions conceded to us. So God, 
in the light of his own loving attributes, is again lost; 
Christ, in the simplicity of his speech, the directness of his 
work, the immediateness of his fellowship, is obscured ; 
and the illumination, which is to be wrought in our lives 
as the new efficient force of the incarnation, is smothered 
down. The kingdom of God becomes meat and drink, a 
shifting of liabilities, and not righteousness and peace and 
joy in the Holy Ghost ; and this to the exact degree in 
which we thrust our dogma forward. 

But the strictly vicarious element can not be admitted 
without its forcing itself into the foreground. A judicial 
claim is of so positive and peremptory a nature, is such a 
bar to purely moral considerations, lends such a deaf ear 
to reason and mercy, rides down, in so unfaltering a way, 
* I Cor. xv, 3. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 47 1 

all opponents that it draws the first, the most immediate, 
attention. Arraigned under a legal process, standing 
before a judge, everything becomes impertinent that is not 
legal, and the feeblest tipstaff has precedence of Grace 
and Wisdom. So it is in the incarnation. Christ the holy 
and divine teacher, the ensample, the companion and 
guide, can find no sufficient place beside the quasi crim- 
inal, the substitute, the stupendous sacrifice, who is to set 
right Heaven's laws ; to gather in his bosom, and quench 
in his blood, the thunderbolts of Justice through all time ; 
to open the gates of the Upper Kingdom, otherwise hope- 
lessly closed against us. His words, his spirit, his love 
are incidental to this Herculean labor, and the blood of 
his sacrifice is a symbol to us, not of cleansing and fellow- 
ship, but the stain upon the lintel which warns off the 
avenging angel. The life of Christ thus* sinks into the 
shadow of his death, and his death is no longer the simple, 
natural completion of his life, giving the fullest emphasis 
to its lessons of love and sacrifice, but that for which he 
came, that for which Earth and Heaven united in making 
ready. When, for a moment, we sit at the feet of Christ 
for instruction, the feverish atmosphere of the great event 
is still with us, preventing quiet, deep insight, and impart- 
ing a strained and straitened temper to all that is said. 
As the work of Christ is thus taken up, and to such a 
degree exhausted, by the urgency of an importunate, legal 
claim, we catch the same spirit in achieving under it our 
salvation. To escape the penalty of the law becomes a 
leading consideration, to effect an entrance into Heaven 
a first aim; while the true and only spiritual work that' 
falls to us, of achieving a salvation in our own hearts and 
in the world about us by a peaceful and pure possession 
of the truth, and a vigorous and grateful participation in 
the moral and religious life here open to us is, at least in 



472 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

part, overlooked. Why should it not be ? If legal terms 
are primary in the work of Christ, may they not rightly be 
in the salvation wrought by him? We can not well give 
less emphasis to judicial, formal facts than he gave, nor 
more to spiritual forces and interior life. If, in his scheme 
of salvation, those are foremost, so must they be in our 
salvation under it. Thus we are saved and so made holy, 
not made holy and so saved. The regenerative power of 
divine truth and love is hidden behind a vicarious inflic- 
tion, is inoperative till this gives the permissive signal ; 
the possession of a pure heart suffers the reduction that 
salvation comes not by it or through it, but turns on an 
agency quite alien to it. We are not taught first to escape 
sin and so its fruits ; but first to evade penalties, and later 
look for cleansing. It is hardly too much to say, that, 
without a careful watchfulness against the inherent ten- 
dency of this dogma, cowardice and meanness will easily 
attend on the spirit with which we shelter our guilty, lazy 
selves, half in love with sin, under the sufferings of Christ; 
that harshness and cruelty will easily accompany the feel- 
ing with which we reject those who reject our panacea. 
Why not? A salvation achieved by an act of acceptance 
is too easy, too plain, to call for patience toward those 
who stumble at its performance ; and, moreover, its efficacy 
must be firmly sustained in the mind. Will any one ven- 
ture to say what limits this and kindred feelings have found 
in the average church-member? A real salvation, one 
achieved in the heart by divine patience and love, against 
blindness, willfulness and indolence, can not but leave the 
heart tender, patient and compassionate. The truth is, 
earnest Christians must push, and do practically push, 
into the back-ground this vicarious operation of grace, 
and call to the front redemptive love and obedience. 
They relieve themselves in action of what they may still 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 473 

hold in theory. How could we put a greater conflict, greater 
contradiction, between the words of Christ and his work, 
than to make salvation in this turn on an act wholly alien 
to us, while in his speech it is ever springing up afresh in 
our affections ? 

The benumbing power of this dogma is also seen in 
its effect on exegesis. Scripture truths become cold, bar- 
ren, straitened under it. "Wherefore the law was our 
school-master to bring us unto Christ, that we might be 
justified by faith."* "But if we walk in the light, as he 
is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and 
the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all 
sin."f "And be found in him, not having mine own 
righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is 
through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of 
God by faith. "$ " To declare I say, at this time his right- 
eousness ; that he might be just and the justifier of him 
that believeth in Jesus. "§ How do these and kindred 
passages drop their spiritual burden, evaporate their 
nutritious substance, and narrow down into a tough, 
fibrous fact under a strict vicarious rendering? A single 
achieved result is substituted for a living, on-going, organic 
process, and the soul falls off from the bosom of love 
where it was hourly nourished and its salvation hourly 
enlarged. 

The notion of the divine law is also perverted by a 
vicarious penalty. In place of a searching, unfolding, 
moral constitution, in man, in society, in the world, one 
quickened by special precepts scattered historically along 
the development of the church, we are, by supposition, 
put in possession of a complete code, in chapter and 
section, with marginal rendering, and with penalties 

* Gal. iii, 24. f I Jno. i, 7. 

X Phil, iii, 9. § Ro. iii,. 26. 



474 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

affixed j a law, unchangeable, universal and formally 
announced. This seems to us a pure fiction, begotten 
reflexly by the facts it is intended to explain. We com- 
mend the inquiry, Where is that positive law under which 
a vicarious punishment takes place ? 

We must, then, attribute the prevalence of this dogma 
to a deep, underlying, moral truth, capable of partial 
expression on this judicial side • to that tendency of the 
human mind which leads it to delight in the narrow, logi- 
cal, mechanical, as opposed to the large and spiritual ; and 
to the historical force which this tendency gathered in the 
long journey of the church through the scholastic era. 

We turn now to the positive purposes subserved by the 
incarnation. It is not within our power to state them 
fully, we shall make no such attempt. All the spiritual 
impulses that have followed and shall follow from this 
event are included in its object. We trace a few, for us 
brightest, beams of divergent light, and leave the heavens 
aglow with them. 

The incarnation was a new, a more personal and living 
disclosure of God. It is the triumph of our spiritual 
nature, the strength of its grasp, to find God easily every- 
where, to come in constant and pleasurable contact with 
him. But how long is the path, and how many the need- 
ful helps, for the race of man, to this consummation ? To 
us, the crowning event in this direction, the most sufficient 
aid are the life and words of Christ. The clouds clear at 
this point, and uncover the heavens above us. We have 
seen out ; we have seen into the spiritual universe. Like 
the touch of the gardener, that guides the first tendrils of 
the vine, blindly searching for their support, is this bend- 
ing of God to us in Christ, till we attach ourselves to him, 
grow by him, till he is every moment with us, and his 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 475 

strength under us. The universe is the physical frame over 
which we spread our lives, by which we are lifted into the 
light, yet what definite quickening by this and that truth, 
by this and that divine approach to us, do we require, 
before we begin freely to unfold under, and rejoice in, the 
love of Heaven. Our nearest point of contact, our most 
sensible point of contact, one whose heat reaches even to 
our lower nature, is this in Christ ; and he becomes the 
anointed one, the express image of that supreme power 
that lies back of him. 

Again, the coming of Christ is all in all to us because, 
coming forth from God, he came with hands full of gifts 
for our spiritual renovation. Words, affections, actions, 
an incarnate life, a spirit true to its own law, these are his 
gifts, and he thus becomes to us an instructor, friend and 
guide. We feel with Philip, " We have found him of whom 
Moses in the law and the prophets did write." We have 
found him who proffers the fellowship for which every 
earnest soul is yearning ; we have found him who came 
from Heaven, who is in Heaven, who can lead us to Hea- 
ven. " I am the way, the truth and the life." On his lips 
instruction ceases to be counsel, it is guidance, love, impulse. 
The only efficient command, hitherto novel to the race, is 
given by him, " Follow me." A path of light into the light 
needs no justification to those who see it. 

A third purpose of the incarnation was a more clear 
and searching definition of the law of spiritual life, that of 
sacrifice, that of bending the neck unreservedly to the 
burdens resting on the race. This part of the work of 
Christ culminates in the cross, and hence the cross becomes 
the symbol of his method and his kingdom. We take each 
his cross and follow after him, this is the law of our life ; 
we stand at the foot of his cross and are sprinkled with his 
blood of sacrifice, this is our consecration, our sanctifica- 



476 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

tion. We are crucified unto the world and the world unto 
us, as a realm alien to this spirit. We are set to vanquish 
it, to subject it to love ; and this none can do who have . 
not the spirit of Christ in its purity of devotion and power 
of patience. There is here an opportunity for misappre- 
hension. The method of Christ may be mistaken as harsh, 
ascetic, out of fellowship with nature. Not so. It is not 
wealth as wealth, but wealth as the embodied representa- 
tion of the selfish, unspiritual greed of those who accumu- 
late it, that is assailed. The lessons of life, as most are 
learning them, are filled with fundamental mistakes, with a 
secret, pervasively mischievous spirit, with a chronic error 
of heart. All must be begun afresh. It will not answer 
to measure the new by the old, the old can not contain it. 
Better that we should know nothing, than insist obstinately 
on what we seem to know. We are not to carry our world- 
craft with us into a kingdom of love. We must remake 
the habits of the soul, we must recast the hand-writing in 
which we are tracing our thoughts, commence with first 
principles, and allow a new organizing force to rearrange 
all its elements. "Go, sell all that thou hast and come 
and follow me." This may often be to the rigidly and com- 
placently formed character, the essential condition of a 
thoroughly renovated life. The soul of man renewed, 
wealth will be renewed in its spirit and uses. This regen- 
erative law of sacrifice, this life of love, is enthroned in the 
cross, and there demands our loyalty. The life and the 
death of Christ disclose the deep-seated moral conflict that 
is in the world. The selfish overflow of the human heart, 
by which its best affections are greatly restricted, or alto- 
gether smothered, is easily forgotten. The surface of 
society takes a gloss of conventionalities ; one measure of 
sympathy, of carefulness, seems possible, another impossi- 
ble j our charities, good-will and love cut out for themselves 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 477 

narrow beds, and flow on in slender rills, with no power to 
relieve the barrenness beyond their feeble water-courses. 
Rigorous seasons and sterile soil prevail, but we are ready 
to feel that the heavens war against us, that duty is suffer- 
ance, the making the best of a little. Christ would put 
everything on another, a spiritual, footing. He would 
make every heart the centre of a new, a regenerative, 
power. He would commit us freely and unreservedly to 
the salvation of the world. He would break down its bar- 
riers, pour abroad its streams, and let their waters discharge 
themselves freely on its barren places. This new and 
holier temper discloses at once the cold spiritual conditions 
with which it comes in contact, the want of a deep, perva- 
sive love, the inability of the languid moral impulses, the 
feeble affections, to find their own and feed upon it ; their 
bondage under restricted, grasping desires. This conflict, 
in the time of Christ, ran hastily on to the crucifixion, and 
it became apparent, then as now, that a conventional life, 
no matter what its precise phase, repels the purely spirit- 
ual, the divinely rational, locks itself up under limited con- 
ditions, and becomes the barrier, the stubborn barrier, to 
the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus duty, responsibility, guilt 
are restored clearly to the human heart; it is primarily at 
fault ; it is found struggling to eliminate or to restrain the 
pure spiritual powers, as they force a slow growth against 
the customs and organic bonds of the selfish social and 
individual spirit. The cross of Christ reveals most dis- 
tinctly this conflict, signalizes the temper with which the 
war is to be waged, the devotion of its servants, the nature 
of its victories, and the slow, sublime issues to which they 
are ripening. 

The real vicarious element in the moral world is also 
clearly brought out by the cross of Christ, an element, a 
relation, far more pervasive than could be indicated by any 



47^ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

single penal infliction. Vicarious sufferings, and vicarious 
joys are everywhere, as broad and inevitable as the bonds 
of the sympathetic, spiritual life we lead one with another. 
Justice, as a precise adjustment of circumstances to deserts, 
is quite secondary. It would seem that our common con- 
ditions, our interwoven liabilities, hopes, dangers, were 
designed to thrust aside that justice by which each thinks 
to stand on his own, defend his own, grow by his own. We 
are touched by everybody ; helped, hindered by everybody. 
Heaven itself can not draw up into its own wealth, but 
must needs give its best to the Earth. Its moral constitu- 
tion would be damaged if it did not. The breath of our 
spiritual life is this pervasive moral atmosphere which all 
lives are breathing with us, whose conditions are conditions 
of health or disease to us and them alike, into whose 
mobile depths the most corrupt soul is casting its effluvia. 
Every instant, every act, of our moral lives is vicarious, 
and the sublimest expression of this supreme principle is 
the cross of Christ. Its true sacrificial force belittles, hides 
out of sight, the formal value attributed to it. It is not 
the penalties of sins committed that it wipes out once for 
all, but it exists in momentary, everlasting struggle with 
every selfish, sinful impulse in us ; it sets up its claim of 
love, vicarious, sacrificial love, over every possession, every 
power, in the moral world. 

We sometimes see a soft, beautiful, changeable image 
cast by a card, hung to the light with a few incisions, a 
part here and there turned outward. In the shifting sun- 
beams, it holds an intangible, variable, spiritual outline of 
lights and shades, suggesting some reality of finest mould. 
Take the card from the window, study its slits and its 
slight inflections, and it is barren outline. Such is the 
vicarious work of Christ, if we take it out of the light of 
God's love, and make a bald penal fact of it, tracing only 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 479 

the lines of justice. cut sharply into it. God forgive us that 
we can not look at truths and leave truths as he puts them, 
and where he puts them. 

It does not fall to the life of Christ to bring out one 
truth, to enforce one principle, but all truths gather in at 
this centre of light, as the beauties of a sunset scatter them- 
selves prodigally through the vault of heaven. Interven- 
tion, a pervasive divine presence, the open ear of Heaven, 
its sustaining hand, its spiritual aid, immortality, are 
all here. 

Hence the work of Christ, as a constructive agency, 
passes easily into that of the Holy Spirit. At all points, 
and at no point more clearly than in the work of the Holy 
Spirit, does the fundamental difference between a moral 
and a judicial view of the atonement, a spiritual and a 
legal definition of our relation to God, appear. We are 
content that this presentation of the atonement should be 
called the moral theory, if only the word moral is allowed 
its proper breadth, if it is made to include the roots of 
righteousness, and the conditions of the growth of right- 
eousness, in our intellectual and emotional constitution. 
Holiness is wholeness, and wholeness is of necessity denned 
by primitive, type endowments. Wholeness is the perfect 
type, the work hinted at finished, and this is holiness. 
Those who look at religion as something essentially super- 
natural, and so abnormal to the soul, can not identify it 
with a development of our entire nature, pervaded by 
ethical forces, a development brought about by new divine 
facts. To do this would be to restore religion to the soul, 
to confound it with healthy, complete growth under the 
highest conditions. 

We assent to the fact, that the religionist, who makes 
every spiritual movement hinge directly on the will of God, 
not on his will as already expressed in the constitution of 



480 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the world, and going on to unfold itself by methods therein 
contained, but on his will in each act of regeneration spring- 
ing up afresh — can not fail to attack a moral system as 
wholly subversive of religion. We have, on the other side, 
done hardly less than this in affirming that religion of this 
type is hostile to morality, ignoring its true offices, pushing 
it aside with alien powers, and submitting to a method 
quite adverse to it. 

Very different are the fundamental conceptions of the 
religionist and the moralist, these words being carefully 
shaped to our present use of them. The religionist can 
devoutly say, We must have a better righteousness than 
our own ; the moralist must say, In no proper sense can we 
have any other righteousness than our own. The religionist 
will humbly say, Our own righteousness is but filthy rags; 
the moralist, accepting the humility of the phrase, will still 
assert, We can never walk cleansed and clothed, never 
walk in white, till we are made clean by interior cleansing, 
and this cleanness is our pure garment. Between the two 
there will be much misapprehension ; the religionist will 
feel that the very letter of Scripture is with him, and the 
moralist that its entire spirit is on his side. Taking part, 
we must say, The deep truth, it seems to us, is with the 
moralist — our moralist — and his is the just apprehension 
of holiness. 

Equally alien, on the one side and the other, are the 
conceptions of sin and punishment. The religionist trem- 
blingly says, We should now be, and hitherto would 
have been, in hell, if justice had been done us, if grace 
had withheld its hand. If we understand this language 
clearly, if we express by it a truth and not a feeling, if hell 
stands for a place of torments, of insufferable, external 
inflictions by fire or otherwise, then to the moralist the 
assertion is abhorrent. What God does, is the thing to 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 48 T 

be done; and not to do it, to put the sinner on a first 
offence into hell, would be repugnant to every ethical 
affection, an act as inadmissible, to say the least, in God 
as it would be in an earthly parent. Not a single moral 
impulse would be met by it, and many would be outraged. 
No ends of government, persuasion, or love would be sub- 
served. Cruelty is cruelty, no matter who perpetrates it, 
and must always move the moral world into antagonism, 
an antagonism the more unflinching because of the great- 
ness of the power that inflicts it ; since power makes 
cruelty at once unnecessary, malignant and dangerous. 
It is not creditable to our understandings and hearts, 
that we should any longer be puzzled by riddles of lan- 
guage like these, that we should not be able to separate 
the feeling from the abstract truth, be able with the reli- 
gionist to save the former without, like him, utterly destroy- 
ing the latter. 

But it will be said, herein lies a difference between the 
two schemes, the one magnifies the offence of sin, the other 
palliates it; it is the settled repulsion of the religionist, he 
proceeds to exterminate it, the moralist toys with it, ma- 
nipulates it, hoping in the end to correct it, and make some- 
thing of it. This difference does not exist as it is thought 
to exist. The religionist defines sin, gives character to it, 
from the outside, the moralist from the inside. With the 
former sin is so little bad that its badness is liable to be 
overlooked without a penalty, that the sinner must be cast 
into hell as a means of showing that he is in a dangerous 
way. Thus sin becomes an evil not so much by what it 
is, as by what God puts upon it. Its misfortune lies in the 
will of God toward it, quite as much as in its own nature. 
The moralist, the Christian moralist, says rather, that sin 
is what it is primarily by its own nature, that it mars con- 
stitutional, primitive law } violates, entangles, subverts it. 
21 



482 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Its own inevitable fruits at once disclose and constitute, 
constitute and disclose, its character. It is sin because it 
subverts, and so far as it subverts, thwarts and destroys. 
Let sin alone, and it will always, under a wise, constitu- 
tional law define itself, condemn itself, punish itself. It 
may gather other punishments, but these will be incident 
to this, its first punishment. If God keeps in harmony 
and strength the working forces of his creation, sin will 
become penalty, penalty correction, correction instruction, 
till either sin is arrested, or, refusing arrest, lies crushed 
under its own accumulated evil. It is a stronger emphasis 
of condemnation which God puts upon sin in the nature 
of the soul, of society, of the universe, than can be put 
upon it by allowing it intrinsically to be one thing, and by 
positive appointment quite another. This is to put decla- 
ration at war with declaration, the . secondary with the 
primary utterance of God, and to fill the sinful soul, not 
with its own ways, but with the tempestuous wrath of heav- 
en. Evil can only beget evil, anger anger, above and 
below. God has defined sin, put his seal upon it, given 
the limits of its destructive quality. By this organic law, 
declaration, of heaven we may as well abide. Sin can not 
be made greater than the mischief it works, and this mis- 
chief is great enough, if understood, to magnify it far 
beyond our thoughts. 

Take the soul that sin has wrought in freely sixty years, 
and its state is a much clearer and a scarcely less terrible 
fact than a sinner in hell. The one we would be glad to 
help out, and he perchance could be helped out, and would 
at least be wdlling to be helped out ; the other we neither 
could help out, nor will he lay hold of our extended hand. 
What is the external to the internal, a sword-stroke to the 
leprosy, a scourge to putrefaction ! " If urged with the 
stringency of Scriptural language, which seems to put the 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 483 

offence of sin in the anger of God, we answer, This is 
inevitable, natural ; and we are not wise to be misled by it. 
The concrete and personal have the precedence of the 
abstract and general. Yet the underlying truth of God's 
indignation is his and our moral nature, is the nature of 
sin. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord." 
We may look, if we will, upon this language as an eager 
claim on the part of God of the sweet morsel of infliction 
for himself, or we may look upon it as a rescuing, a wrest- 
ing, of vengeance from the hand of man, and a calm resump- 
tion of punishment into the depths of his own moral 
insight, and patient, far-reaching, corrective laws. If the 
mind vacillates a little between the two impressions, it may 
be checked in its headlong anger by the first, and be 
made ready to pass over, the revelation of God growing 
brighter, to the second. Language is not exact truth, it is 
the ways on which the soul is launched forward in its search 
after truth. 

There are a few cardinal convictions we are compelled 
to cling to, or the universe, religion, God, are all lost in a 
bewildering maze. They are these, sin is sin by virtue of 
a choice, in view of truths measurably disclosed ; it is 
mingled largely with ignorance, yet with an ignorance that 
has in it the grit of a selfish purpose, and will not be dis- 
solved away by simply perennial waters of truth ; that the 
world tarries and grows under discipline, consecutive, 
evolving discipline, and this is why it tarries. God works, 
and we work, under conditions which his reason has 
defined, which our reason in a measure — in the measure 
of our knowledge — confirms, and from which neither he 
nor we may depart. God's spiritually persuasive work, 
which pervades this discipline and constitutes its moral 
power, is that of the Holy Spirit, the third form in the 
Trinity. 



484 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

The incarnation of Christ tends to a definiteness of 
personality in the second form of the Trinity quite alien 
to the vague and subtile suggestion of the appellation, Holy 
Ghost. We ought, on neither side, to be led to a greater 
or to a less sense of knowledge than that which actually 
belongs to us. If Christ becomes a distinct, enucleated 
portion of Deity, and the Spirit remains a vague, flitting 
agency, each result is largely the product of the imagina- 
tion, and quite beyond our exact knowledge. So God dis- 
closes himself in Christ, and in the Spirit, and partially in 
one as in the other. It is the imagination rather than the 
intuition, in either case, that is likely to furnish the staple 
of our impressions ; the form, therefore, rather than the 
substance of the belief that prevails with us. 

Little as we can penetrate the essence of either Divine 
Disclosure, we are able to see why the doctrine of the Holy 
Spirit should have received peculiar prominence at the 
resumption of Christ. The disciples were not, to their own 
feelings, to be left alone, to be left comfortless. A more 
subtile, but not therefore a less divine and real, guidance 
was to be granted them. They were to enter into the spirit 
of the new salvation, the' coming kingdom, and in it and 
by it to find immediate fellowship with the Divine Spirit, 
the Holy Spirit. This contact of the pure spirit with God, 
this feeding of the truth-loving soul with truth, its love and 
sympathy with sympathy and love, find a personal form 
in the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, a doctrine not less real, 
though more spiritual, than the revelation of God in Christ. 
Nor are we any more disturbed by supernatural forces 
attending on and enforcing the one revelation, than by those 
which waited on the other. 

A purely supernatural faith and a profoundly natural 
one, a faith which looks on religious life as the giving of 
new powers, and one which regards it as the calling forth 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 485 

of original faculties, will separate widely in the interpre- 
tation of the work of the Holy Spirit. The religionist is 
content to make its offices a mystery, a superinduction of 
forceful divine energies on effete or decaying life, the 
moralist — and we use the word again in our own significa- 
tion — in firm allegiance to the free spirit within him, can 
not readily accept any interpretation which militates against 
the independent power of the soul, but looks upon the 
work of the Holy Spirit as God's constant, pervasive, spir- 
itual ministration, under spiritual law, to the growth of the 
human spirit, led to seek and accept every regenerative 
influence. He would adopt into a careful phraseology the 
words of Peter. ' ' Ye have purified your souls in obeying 
the truth through the Spirit." 

We have no more reason to suppose that God, in an 
occult way than in an open way, overbears the soul of 
man ; indeed for the very reason that he does not do it 
openly, we have strong ground to believe that he does not 
do it secretly ; that whatever is the action of the Holy 
Spirit it is entirely consistent with our liberty ; that it is 
open to man to quench its light, and grieve its love. It is 
a characteristic of spirit to commune with spirit; such 
communion is an ordinary spiritual function. Language, 
action, the glance of an eye, a tacit sense of affinity in any 
way evoked, are its conditions. So souls draw strength 
from each other, take up and nourish each other, and find 
a wonderful enlargement of life. The All-inclusive, the 
Omnipotent Spirit, the Holy Spirit, not only may, but must, 
stand on like terms of ministration to finite spirits. Its 
mediums of suggestion are manifold. The light and 
aspiration, springing up directly in the soul, may seem to 
be, may be, an inspiration. So do we with less, though 
with more separate, sensible means of communication — and 
with less means because such determinate and exterior 



486 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

ones — breathe our life into another, and awaken in him a 
new power. Let the key of spiritual intercourse be found, 
let the soul think of God, and think with God, and follow 
his unfolding truth and love as they present themselves, 
and the pervasive, spiritual Presence of the world becomes 
a momentary experience ; the mind pillows itself on the 
purposes of God, and feels his power pulsating freely 
through it ; his thought, like fhe waves of a yet more sub- 
tile ether, bears light and life everywhere. This will seem 
dreamy and obscure to one who is not wont to work under 
the spiritual laws of his being ; so may the ties of friend- 
ship be to such an one a feeble web, though they grapple 
with hooks of steel the souls that heed them. To one 
who is spiritually alive, the doctrine of a Holy Spirit, a 
divine, quickening, omnipresent Power, may be a daily 
experience, as real as the busy, searching, theorizing 
thought which glances hourly out of the eyes of the scient- 
ist, and makes the world for him intellectual. Put rational 
insight for thought, love for enthusiasm, and we have a 
spiritual flame fed by the Father of Spirits. 

Of this communion we cannot say as the religionist 
may say, " Efficacious Grace — rthe work of the Spirit, is 
altogether mysterious. Its effects are not to be explained, 
naturally, i. e., by the laws which govern our intellectual 
and moral exercise."* We believe grace to be, in the 
deepest possible sense, natural, the overflow of the 
divine life on the human life, fitted by constitution to 
receive it and grow by it ; so a plant is quickened by the 
energy of light, heat, actinic ray, streaming in from the far 
distant sun. The active, palpitating leaf, bathed in visible 
and invisible sun-forces, its circulation renewed in every 
channel, its pulse quick, is an image of the soul that is 

* Systematic Theology, Hodge, vol. ii, p. 683. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 487 

awakened to the divine presence, and responding to a 
spiritual force. 

It is impossible to define all the ways in which the 
Divine Spirit can touch and awaken the human spirit ; 
they are like unto, and far more numerous than, those by 
which we are made to feel the presence of each other. 
The cathedral puts sublimely, almost oppressively, upon us 
the intellectual force, the Eesthetical sentiment, the worship- 
ful thought of its architect. We can not, save by dullness, 
evade its presence, escape the atmosphere, which envelops 
it : far less can we, in this universe, at once upreared in 
rugged strength, and flowing on in flexible life, miss its 
divine power. While the basis of such an influence is 
natural, purely natural, profoundly natural, we admit, on 
sufficient evidence, the transcended limit, the visible super- 
natural hold. Yet we believe this spiritual agency more 
magnified by giving it a large natural range, than by rush- 
ing readily with it into the supernatural region. The honor 
of man, in the two attitudes of thought, has no comparison. 

The work of the Holy Spirit is sanctification, in other 
words, the growing, the rearing under fellowship of the 
human soul, a work that, to the living, begins with life, and 
ends never. Conversion marks the first free, full conces- 
sion to this commanding, persuasive work ; and may be 
hidden in an evenly illuminated history, or stand brightly 
out as an eventful era. To obey, to drink in the spirit of 
obedience; to love, to enter into the joy of love; to sac- 
rifice and to cast out of the sacrifice the reluctant, egotistic, 
backward tendency, and to put in its place the spiritual 
affections, the foreshadowing enthusiasms of the coming 
heavenly kingdom ; to stand an integer of life fed by all 
the life, the sad facts and the joyful facts, the gifts visible 
and invisible, of God's universe, as gathered up and held 
together in holiness, this is sanctification. 



4oo A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

It is a work without limits. Our demand for, our hope 
for, immortality is this our inexhaustible nature, that we, 
can stand in living intercourse with the Infinite, and so 
share his life. The possibility of symmetrical, spiritual 
growth, and the impulse to it are found in our triple con- 
stitution, in our intellectual, emotional and voluntary 
powers. No one of the faculties can successfully and pro- 
tractedly grow without the stimulative claims arising from 
the growth of the others. Any equilibrium of death, which 
might tend to overtake one, is forced back by the activity 
of the remaining two. The soul is normally awakened by 
insight, by truth, by light ; but this insight as a force 
expends itself instantly on the emotions, calling forth 
affections in harmony with itself; while these affections, 
in turn, become the springs of action. But action quickens 
again insight, and even more than it, nourishes the feel- 
ings ; feelings that increasingly become the atmosphere of 
the soul, reflecting, dispersing, coloring all its light. A 
pure intellectual truth is to the emotional apprehension of 
it by an enriched spirit, what a dazzling ray of sunlight, 
gliding through the empty spaces beyond the earth's man- 
tle of air, without illuminating or warming them, is to the 
same ray, softened, diffused, glorified in the atmosphere 
we live in. 

Simple intellectual progress becomes at length cold 
and barren. Some feel it a hopeless task even to attempt 
to enter on it. They are ready to accept tradition, and to 
forget their initial duty in handling their own powers. 
"Hardly," says Rousseau, "shall such an one — one who 
must guide his own thoughts — in his extreme old age, be 
quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he 
finds out before he dies in what faith he ought to live."* 
This is an intellectual difficulty, when only the intellect is 
* Rousseau, by Morley, vol. ii, p. 274. 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 489 

taken by itself. The whole man can find many centres 
of life, and enlarge safely from any of them. A pursuit of 
truth that runs in advance speculatively, may speedily 
embarrass itself. Truths which may be made to minister 
directly to the affections are not far to find, and, expended 
in action, lead the soul securely to others. The practical 
demand of the soul for truth is neither so rapid, nor so 
exact, as its purely speculative demand, and the way to 
truth, moreover, is far safer when pursued under the con- 
stant correction of experience and the affections. If the 
intellect is made primarily nutritive, performing its own 
functions reciprocally in connection with all the functions 
of life, it will not be found fatally defective. Plans, out- 
lines, demand a precision, a rectilinear accuracy, which 
can be partially dispensed with in practice. A mistake of 
the intellect is fatal only when the heart is sick, and the 
will imbecile ; as unwholesome food is poison only to a 
system too weak to reject it. "Truth," says Landor, "is 
like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities it calms 
men, in larger heats and irritates them, and is attended by 
fatal consequences in its excess."* This is a fact of indi- 
gestion, not digestion ; and spiritual indigestion is the 
result of truth, so called, fed on without evoking the fitting 
affections, or building up character. So shortly it be- 
comes, as in theological dogma, the heavy statements of a 
logical system, and not refreshing, spiritual facts, links 
in history, which quicken the emotions and nourish the 
manhood. 

It is, therefore, the Spirit of God, a Spirit of Love, 
supremely present in acts of love, a Spirit who nourishes 
the affections, and who is sent of Christ to bring forward 
his kingdom, it is this Spirit, that can sanctify, that can 
cleanse and strengthen and vivify, the soul by truth, that 
* Landor's Conversations, vol. i, p. 35. 



49° A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

can drop the seeds of a new year even in the cold, dead, 
autumnal soil, that follows the spasmodic fervor of our 
partial efforts. 

Religion is constantly getting into the rut. There is a 
double work of the Spirit of Truth, first on the individual 
and through the individual on the church and on society ; 
the two instantly setting up their reactions, and limiting 
each other. Not merely is man free, the construction of 
his life is voluntary, character is the product of his will, 
and the organization of society the product of characters, 
characters whose mutual dependence it expresses. Hence 
progress, both individual and collective, is constantly mis- 
carrying. Men begin and refuse to complete their work ; 
they do it badly, and find quick arrest in it. In a thou- 
sand ways the weakness of the individual will, as a line of 
decay, penetrates society. Hence growth becomes a 
series of disasters even more than of triumphs, of corrup- 
tions that are the conditions of reform. Sanctification is a 
protracted struggle under adverse conditions, and the 
Spirit of God, which brings light out of darkness, which 
gives a personal force to the conquering power of truth 
and love,— love that comes loitering on in the footsteps of 
truth — becomes the refuge, the patience and the courage, 
of the believing heart. The soil is seen to be deepened 
by the decay of each season, and the next to give a better 
promise. The earnest soul thus waits in work on the 
Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of God, moving on the face of 
the waters, and is first consoled, then encouraged, then 
astonished. The spirit is sanctified as it grows into the 
knowledge and life of God, as it grows into the knowledge 
and life of its spiritual environment. It has two inex- 
haustible directions of development, its fellowship with 
God, its fellowship with society, with the spiritual kingdom 
which encompasses it, and is forever coming. The narrow 



CONSTRUCTIVE FACTS. 49 1 

life of the individual thus gathers breadth directly from 
God, indirectly from him in his entire spiritual work. 

A plain condition of this sanctification is prayer, a con- 
stant, conscious casting of the soul on God. Prayer has 
its caricatures. "We often treat God in the same manner 
as we would treat some doting, or some passionate old 
man ; we feign, we flatter, we sing, we cry, we gesticulate."* 
But prayer remains none the less, feeble, blind and abused 
as it is, the essential relation of a free, dependent person- 
ality toward a personal God. Nor does it admit of inflexi- 
ble, universal, natural law. Spirit, flexible, feeble, restricted 
in time, yet hoping, struggling, aspiring, can not nourish 
its affections on natural laws. Natural laws, as universal 
and unchangeable, distinctly understood, appall the soul ; 
they freeze its free currents like polar cold. They must 
do so for there is no freedom under them. Clear vision 
shows the assertion of such freedom to be the deceitful 
mirage of a thirsty soul. The spiritual must have been in 
the beginning back of the natural, it must throughout 
remain back of it ; deeper than it our passionate entreaty 
must find the ear of reason, the ear of God. The spiritual 
must hold the natural in solution. The natural may crys- 
tallize according to its own well-ordered nature, but the 
spiritual must be able at any moment to redissolve it, and 
so to rearrange it. If the natural is held in and under the 
spiritual, it becomes a means in its hand. The diamond 
shares the light that shines through it. But if the natural 
crowds back the spiritual, contains it and is not contained 
by it, measures it is not measured by it, then our personal- 
ity loses the personality of God, or both sink into blind, 
fatalistic forces, and growth, freedom, sanctification disap- 
pear. There rolls in athwart the horizon the grand but 
crushing wheel of evolution, gathering like the involved 

* Landor's Conversations, vol. i, p. 352. 



492 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

storm, every living thing, and licking up the very dust of 
the earth. Personality can only thrive between the two 
elements, the fixed and the flexible, the material and the 
spiritual, the earth and the air. The doctrine of the Holy 
Spirit is a perpetual protest against omnivorous force. 
We rejoice in it. It expresses the pervasive power of God, 
the spiritual breath of his universe, the divine life that is 
in it. It is strictly, preeminently a doctrine for the spirit 
of man. He who is a spirit is known as a Spirit; is wor- 
shiped and loved and sought unto in spirit and in truth. 

We remind the reader again, that the morality of which 
we have spoken is the coalescence of morality and religion, 
two drops newly ensphered at one centre ; that sanctifica- 
tion is the finishing up of what God began in creation ; 
and that nature is an out-putting of wisdom and power 
which may at any moment, and to any degree, be subsumed 
under the free life of God — a life that can no more be 
reduced to a proposition, crowded into a formula, than can 
that of man. 

Spontaneity transcends logic in the same degree that it 
transcends force ; and unknits predestination, the dogma 
of the theologian, as readily as the necessary, coherent 
forces of the scientist ; unknits them freely on occasion, 
because it first knits them on occasion from the resources 
of its own being. 



FUTURE LIFE. 493 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Future Life. 

WE accept the doctrine of immortality because of 
our moral nature. This demands it ; this suffers 
destructive limitations without it ; this nature it is that, 
uniting us sympathetically to God, makes way in us for the 
wisdom and love of God in their infinite sweep. From 
this form of proof it follows, that, as the urgent need of a 
future life is found in our moral constitution, those years 
are given to complete the cycle of these powers, and that 
a future claimed by the laws of our spiritual life is also to 
be interpreted by these laws. But the fundamental fact 
of our moral nature, of the government contained in it, 
and in the environment which responds to it, is " The soul 
that sinneth it shall die,"* taken with its reverse, "Whoso- 
ever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."f 

We would give the fullest meaning to the words, death 
and life; looking upon sin as the distortion, decay and 
waste of our powers, and so facing death-ward, and upon 
righteousness as the harmonizing, preservation and invig- 
oration of them, and so facing life-ward. The last passage 
is especially significant. It was addressed by Christ to 
the sister of Lazarus, and struck far beyond her thoughts, 
and the recognized conditions of the case. It asserted 
in its largest form the law of spiritual life as against the 
fact of death then present. It discloses so broad a princi- 
ple, that the soul that can feel and accept it will look upon 
any disaster as the trough merely between the waves, that 
are one and all lifting it and bearing it onward. " The 
* Ez. xviii, 20. f John xi, 26. 



494 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

soul that liveth — holds spiritual life — and believeth in 
me — the infinite and renewing source of that life — shall 
never die" — shall never suffer arrest of any kind. The 
grave thus becomes a passage from life to greater life. 

The fundamental affirmations of the Scriptures put 
them in harmony with the natural, moral law; they rede- 
clare and reinforce the government of God contained 
therein. "We must all appear before the judgment-seat 
of Christ ; that every one may receive the things done in 
his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be 
good or bad."* Concede a future life, and concede it as the 
expansion, the fulfillment of this life, and we are at once 
placed under our spiritual constitution in the entire sweep 
of its powers, of its progressive, combining and recom- 
bining conditions. Revelation builds up on the principles, 
and returns constantly to the motives, contained in this 
truth of natural religion, immortality ; a truth that follows 
as a corollary from that first truth, the being of a personal 
God, with its implication of a spiritual government. From 
the nature of the proofs which sustain a future life, we 
infer that its rewards and punishments are in no sense 
arbitrary, scarcely positive ; but that they arise in imme- 
diate sequence to our action here, and are the completion 
of that action. We accept the sentiment expressed by 
Martineau, in reference to Revelation. " That could hardly 
be truth at all, which, after roaming the world and search- 
ing the soul for eighteen centuries, has found no natural 
ground on which to rest, and must wander as an ipse dixit 
still."f 

The involved principles of God's natural, actual, moral 
government are evolved, pushed distinctly forward, in Rev- 
elation. There is a future life in completion of this life. 
The impulses and directions now established are deeply 

* II Cor. v, 10. f Studies of Christianity, p. 377. 



FUTURE LIFE. 495 

interesting as having an exhaustless breadth of territory in 
which to expend themselves, in which to disclose their real 
character. A future life is to the individual what coming 
centuries are to the race ; transient causes acquire value 
through a permanent series of effects. 

That Revelation, at the beginning, will state these facts 
more on the side of positive law than on that of moral law, 
more in their personal than in their natural features, is a 
matter of course, for this is the emphasis which the precise 
phase of human thought addressed requires. Even 
strictly natural events, ordinary history in its narration, 
take this presentation, the natural having found in thought 
no clear separation from the supernatural, and both being 
alike referable to God. Revelation is a scaffolding, which 
goes up with the building which it surrounds, not one that 
is reared to its full height in anticipation of the structure 
to which it ministers. As a scaffolding, it keeps level with 
the work, level with the need of the workmen, level with 
the times and occasions at its disposal ; and as a scaffold- 
ing, Revelation drops away in its exceptional features when 
the work is finished. 

We start, therefore, our eschatology with the one ini- 
tial truth which Revelation clearly eliminates from Natu- 
ral Religion, and both enforce : " When lust hath conceived, 
it bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished bringeth 
forth death." This truth divides itself into three truths, 
the government of God is inherent in the righteous and 
the wicked act, and by one inseparable result discloses 
the character of the action, and goes forward to reward 
or to punish it; on this natural basis alone, and in com- 
pletion of it, do positive law and positive infliction find 
place. Exterior concomitants are in harmony with the 
interior lives they deal with, and this harmony is carried 

* James i. 15. 



496 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

forward by perpetual interaction. The rewards and 
punishments of a future life, as disclosed by Revelation, 
conform to this natural government, resting primarily 
on character, and secondarily on consonant conditions. 
This fact being the cardinal, intersecting point of all truths, 
natural and revealed, on this topic, truths that enthrone 
our moral nature and make it at once the ground and the 
interpretation of God's government, we fail to understand 
the reason on which a portion of the prevalent opinions of 
a future life rest. They seem to exist in oversight of that 
fundamental coherence of discipline which enables it to 
point forward, and lead forward. 

It is very generally held that repentance is not invited, 
indeed, as a redemptive agent, is not admissible in another 
state ; that the leading moral features of our present life 
are transient, giving place to fixed results quite at war 
with them. The future thus enters formally in completion 
of the present, but actually in abolition of it. This opinion 
is opposed to the very nature of sin and holiness ; they do 
not allow this setting aside of their fundamental conditions. 
Sin, that it may remain sin, must be accompanied with the 
power of repentance. Sin is not a thing of the past alone, 
but renews itself every instant. It is essential to sin, if it 
is to remain sin, that it shall, at each decision, prefer 
wrong to right ; as it is necessary that one holy shall 
remain in permanent concord with holiness. To the 
degree in which the sinner is cut off, by conditions foreign 
to himself, from obedience, is he cut off from sin, and loses 
his character. Character is a perdurable, present power 
that discloses itself along its entire career by choices. 
The bitterness of sin, and the smouldering heat that bitter- 
ness engenders, are due to the active repulsion between it 
and holiness, the persevering pressure which holiness 
brings to bear upon it. The activity of sin and so its soil 



FUTURE LIFE. 497 

are evoked by the activity of holiness. The opportunity of 
repentance can not be taken from the sinner without sub- 
verting the moral conditions of his guilt, without removing 
holiness from him as a duty. We can never yield the 
axiom of all moral proof: Power and responsibility are 
commensurate. If we should, we could find nothing so 
plain as this again. 

Neither can holiness, the Holy One, do otherwise than 
seek, enjoin, favor repentance. Holiness is antagonistic 
to sin, and its great victory lies, not in perpetuating and 
punishing it, but in removing it. To force, or to attempt 
to force an attitude of eternal transgression by removing 
the opportunities for repentance, the remedial effects of 
repentance, or the new governmental relations incident to 
repentance, would be to work for sin, not against it ; to 
take the sinful, vengeful attitude toward sin, not the right- 
eous one ; to confront evil with evil, not evil with good. 
A redeemed sinner is a moral force infinitely transcending 
a chastised sinner. A criminal hastily crucified by the 
highway and the cross of Christ are scarcely more distinct 
in their lessons. 

The moral government of God is too inherent and co- 
herent to accept arbitrary bounds in this way, beyond 
which it becomes something quite different from itself 
hitherto; its methods and sentiments all reversed. Its 
principles are eternal, and under these principles what is 
fitting to-day, is fitting to-morrow and the day following. 
It is fitting always and every where to repent, hence it is 
ever fitting that the righteous should aid repentance ; and 
this repentance as a fact must alter not less the will of 
God toward the sinner than the will of the sinner toward 
God. Of all moral forces, as the most perfect of all, God 
is least stubborn. These are the fundamental truths of sin 
and holiness, and we can not depart from them. If we 



49^ A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

should yield them, we should weaken the whole super- 
structure of faith. Nothing weakens faith so much as un- 
reason or unholiness in its own articles; it is friable mate- 
rial in the solid wall. We can not establish the being of a 
holy God and of a future life by the force of our moral 
nature, and then proceed to set aside its first principles. 

The view, then, that repentance is not sought for nor 
recognized in another life by the regnant moral Power, is 
quite inadmissible, since it puts that Power in conflict 
with the principles implanted in our own souls, and preva- 
lent in the world about us. Repentance is always in order, 
always renovating, always in modification of moral condi- 
tions. Nor is it probable that repentance as a fact, will be 
wholly unknown in another life. We have no sufficient 
warrant for saying that no one of those even hard and 
mature in sin will repent, passing the bounds of this life. 
Up to these bounds repentance occasionally overtakes 
them, it may overtake them farther on. Though there is 
a rapid reduction of probabilities, as character develops, 
though there is a fearful momentum in sin, which we are 
only too prone to forget, we know of no* absolute, natural 
limits between obedience and disobedience beyond which 
return is impossible, nor can we believe that the will of 
God establishes a bound more stringent than the moral 
forces themselves require. Our daily experience teaches 
us, that moral truths become suddenly and surprisingly 
operative all along the line of our present existence, and 
we may not, therefore, be hasty to affirm that repentance 
never comes to the openly wicked in a future life. We 
shall do well to understand the vigor of the forces with 
which we deal, their fearful liabilities ; but we shall not 
do well to make them other than they are, to push pre- 
cipitately one man over the brink with the hope of saving 
by fear the one nearest him. This effort is plausible only 



FUTURE LIFE. 499 

because we have dealt so much more with motives of fear 
than of love, with deterrent than attractive forces, that we 
are now willing to sacrifice the one to the other, to feel 
ourselves impotent without the wonted scourge in the 
right hand. If we could once learn to shift incentives 
from hand to hand, putting our hopes here and our 
dangers there, we should feel our losses less. 

It is a much more violent supposition that repentance 
never comes to one out of the great masses of men whose 
characters have not been shaped here to a stubborn type 
by cogent truth. When we remember that to most men 
moral questions have at best received but an obscure ex- 
pression, with very moderate motives, we fail to find any 
such vigor in the forces at work, or any such decision in 
the moral attitude assumed, as to foreclose forever this 
class of questions. Inertness doubtless there is, but we 
have not measured all the resources of moral influence. 
To assume easily and cheerfully an arrest of our moral 
nature is presumptuous and unrighteous, and the more so 
as this view is wont to keep vigorously alive these same 
moral susceptibilities merely that they may do the work 
of retribution. Intuitions that can no longer bless the 
soul are maintained simply to blast it. This can not be. 

But a very large portion of the race have passed from 
under the conditions of this life at their very first assump- 
tion, when as yet they had scarcely begun to tell upon them 
for good or for evil. To declare in reference to these this 
great controversy of the soul, its struggle for life, ended, is, 
in the hard, unpitying conditions it imposes, its reckless- 
ness of salvation, downright wickedness, unless the proofs 
admit of no appeal. It is a belief against righteousness 
as it makes light of the chances of righteousness, the 
reaching of righteousness, on the part of a large portion 
of the race. The individual may be called on to accept 



500 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

painful liabilities and grievous sacrifices under general 
laws, but for these concessions there come to him grand 
compensations in the divine government. The individual 
is gathered up in the prosperity of the community, and 
that community ultimately bestows all its wealth on him. 
But principles which should allow great portions of the 
human family to perish under conditions narrow, hard, 
hopeless and arbitrary, are an imputation on God's mercy 
which no system of theology can sustain. Such theories 
sacrifice first truths to second truths, truths of character to 
devices of government, and can never, therefore, find proof 
enough to support them. Our moral nature is the basis of 
our entire argument for the being of God ; subvert it in its 
fundamental principles, and the whole fabric gives way. 
An unmerciful and unjust God, one at war with our moral 
perceptions, can not be established ; for justice and mercy 
and our moral intuitions are our chief resources of proof. 
Lose this light and every object begins to flicker and grow 
obscure in this transcendental region. 

A large number, also, die in infancy. The conditions 
for the formation of character, as a voluntary product, have 
not been so much as entered on. These, then, must either 
perish absolutely, or conditions of development be granted 
them elsewhere. If we accept the doctrine of immortality 
because of our free moral nature, no choice is left us. 
Character can be formed, and must be formed, in a future 
life. A supposition that God, in anticipation of character, 
aside from a spiritual nature unfolding by its own powers, 
under its own laws> reaches for the infant, in an over- 
shadowing way, an issue of good or evil, springs from a 
view of the power of God, and of his method of using it, 
which finds no warrant in the world about us ; indeed, is in 
exact antagonism to the central principle or characteristic 
of a moral system. Such views of the scope of power are 



FUTURE LIFE. 501 

irrational, against the moral reason ; we can only pass 
them, and wait for them to disappear as the light of our 
spiritual day increases. The salvation, if any, which is 
provided in our Christian faith for the children of the 
church, can not be of the nature of a contract. It, too, 
must find ground for itself in fundamental principles, those 
principles which make the spiritual universe to be • to wit, 
that character is voluntary, that it determines the moral 
status, that it is that status. 

But what will be the exact issue which this present life, 
as a moral life, will bring to us ? more especially what will 
be its issue to those who pass forward with perverted, con- 
stitutional forces, established or confirmed by their own 
action ? Very different answers to this question have been 
given, and vigorously defended from the Word of God ; 
each with a measure of success so far as a vigorous ren- 
dering of particular passages can give success. There are 
four replies that may readily be made. The first is, that 
questions of obedience and disobedience, under God's law, 
are closed in this life ; that the disobedient suffer forever 
the fruits of disobedience, and the obedient rejoice forever 
in the rewards of obedience ; that discipline is no longer 
moral, as being possessed of any redemptive force. This 
doctrine, very generally held, is made to rest almost exclu- 
sively on the Scriptures. It finds nothing to sustain it, as 
we have seen, in constitutional moral law, is in arrest of 
that law, and is closely united to doctrines that settle 
results chiefly by the will of God, a will that yields itself 
as arbitrium, not as wisdom, a will, therefore, of which 
reason can ask no explanations. 

A second answer, also strongly urged from the Scrip- 
tures, is that of the annihilation of the wicked ; a third, 
that of their ultimate restoration, argued chiefly from the 
love of God and the redemptive force of truth ; while a 



502 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

fourth, not venturing on a categorical reply, regards it as 
probable that farther discipline in a future state, may result, 
now in restoration, now in annihilation, and often be 
accompanied with protracted punishment. We make no 
mention of the opinion, that life ends the moral conflict, 
and that redemption follows at once for all on its conclu- 
sion. This belief is so utterly without grounds, either in 
reason or Revelation, as to call for no attention. 

In forecasting the conditions of a future life, we have 
two sources of proof, our moral constitution, that is the 
present government of God which is shaping events for the 
future, which is inwrapping the future in the present, and 
the Scriptures. In estimating the Scriptural argument, 
which seems to us to have been pressed, under textual 
interpretation, quite beyond its true limits, we need to bear 
in mind several things. In the first place; the Bible 
assumes the great truths of natural'religion, the being and 
attributes of God, and immortality ; bestows no proof upon 
them, and scarcely gives them a direct assertion as opposed 
to their denial. Revelation, in its own unfolding, accepted 
these truths, as they lay in the minds of those addressed, 
made them indirectly clearer and firmer, and so built upon 
them. But in doing this, the germinant truths, already in 
the soil, were left to grow, to mature the life that was in 
them, and hence were not, and could not be, displaced by 
exact, full statements, setting forth both the facts and their 
precise form. This would have been to overlook the growth 
achieved, and to start growth anew with an interposed 
space, a break of organic force. This is a method that 
always seems possible to man, but we suspect it to be pro- 
foundly impossible, sure to be followed by a series of 
errors, that would travel backward all the untraveled area. 

The doctrine of immortality is assumed and used at 
once to enforce the fundamental law of our being, ethical 



FUTURE LIFE. 503 

and religious ; to wit, that the issues of life are in the life 
itself as inseparable from it ; " Out of the heart are the 
issues of life." We are wont to say, that the Scriptures 
never gratify an idle curiosity — a shallow statement of a 
profound truth. The remark poorly covers the facts to 
which it points. It springs from the idea, that the spirit 
of inspiration, the Holy Spirit, is always speaking to us 
from the fullness of divine resources, and so of design is 
keeping back one truth and bringing forward another. 
We believe the Scriptures rather to have arisen so directly 
for men and from men, the concrete men to whom and 
through whom they came, so to have taken hold of the 
spiritual experience at the time present, its tendencies and 
deficiencies, its truths and half-truths, and also to have 
been so permeated with the spiritual type of the writer, as 
not to have possessed a conscious horizon essentially 
larger than that actually disclosed, or, from the nature of 
the case, then useful. Aside from the words of Christ, we 
see no reason to believe that the thing known transcended 
the thing said, — indeed the two, as in the words of St. Paul, 
may have visibly grown together — and with Christ, the 
thing said accepts easily its incarnation, is habitually con- 
cessive to the real though elastic limitations put upon it 
by the ideas of those addressed. 

Revelation, entering into a purely natural, ethical dis- 
cipline to strengthen and enlarge it, expends its power on 
the enforcement of fundamental truths, and does not 
carry the mind forward to the expansion of thoughts or to 
details of facts essentially beyond the point it has actually 
reached in the spiritual mastery and use of knowledge. 
Mere facts not applicable to present experience, tran- 
scending its living wants, and not grounded in its compre- 
hensions, are first useless, then pernicious. They divert 
the attention, suffer wrong explanations and wrong attach- 



504 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

merits, take on perverted enforcements, are neither ap- 
proached by the truths the mind possesses nor yield safely 
their own truths, and so lead the powers from their present 
growing points, anticipating the future without doing its 
work. 

The primary enforcements, therefore, of what is said in 
the Bible of a future life lie along the well-traveled ways 
of virtue and vice, the one to be sought with exhaustless 
desire, the other to be shunned with untiring aversion. 
The language is to be interpreted under this primary pur- 
pose as always shaped toward it. It may by no means 
allow, then, — as if it were abstract language, a series of 
complete, independent propositions — the pressure of 
deductive logic to be brought to bear upon it, while every 
exuding inference is caught at as the substance and life of 
the truth. The richest grapes are to be eaten as grapes 
rather than flung into the wine-press. An example is 
offered by the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Its 
primary purpose exhausts the parable ; and inferences are 
safe or unsafe as they run parallel with the line of thought 
or are divergent from it ; as they are contemplated in the 
object of the speaker or are accidents of the image. 

The future is dealt with pictorially in the Bible. We 
have a New Jerusalem, a river of life, a judgment day. an 
outer darkness, a worm that dieth not and a fire that is 
not quenched. This language, saturated with imagery, — 
imagery tending to a fixed popular form, and so gathering 
many incongruous accretions — is emphatic and safe only 
when looked on as suggestive, freighted with moral enforce- 
ments ; and unsafe, even debasing, when taken as a precise 
statement of physical facts. We climb by the physical 
image to the spiritual truth, but when we return from the 
truth to the image by which we ascended, we are seeking 
most inconvenient lodgment on a ladder half-way between 



FUTURE LIFE. 505 

earth and heaven. Nor does it answer for us, in making 
definite progress, to decline to analyze the thought and 
the expression, and assign each its value. This must be 
done the moment the need of it becomes a conscious one, 
the instant the intellect asks its own. 

Accepting the authority of the Scriptures, we must yet 
inquire wisely what that authority is, and apply it in a way 
consonant with its scope and spirit. We are not to tran- 
scend the Scriptures by our interpretation of them ; this 
even our reverence may lead us to do. We would remem- 
ber that we can be far more sure of the general force, the 
moral tone, of a book, than of the precise value of par- 
ticular passages ; that the Bible may contain statements 
contradictory in form, but that its fundamental truths must 
be consistent ; that as the direction of a river is not altered 
by its windings to the right or to the left, so the cardinal 
principles of the Scriptures are not affected by the inci- 
dental flexions of single statements, or by the imagery 
forced into their service. We are to follow the primary 
truth, the beam of light, and not be disturbed by its refrac- 
tions, or bewildered by its chromatic dispersions, due to 
the medium through which it is passing. Under this gen- 
eral view, we will briefly inquire, how far the precise con- 
ditions of a future life are defined, or were intended to be 
defined, by Revelation. 

In the spirit of our method, we would keep fundamental 
the fundamental truths of our moral being, so clearly 
accepted, so variously enforced by the word of God. "For 
by thy words — words as holding the heart — thou shalt be 
justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned."* 
The harshness of the assertion of a final probation in this 
life, followed by extreme and unending punishment, is so 
great, as to quite drive its defenders from the court of the 
* Matt, xii, 37. 



506 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

moral reason, and put them for defence solely upon Bibli- 
cal exegesis. But a conflict so declared between reason 
and Revelation, an avowed retreat from one to the other, 
are a very poor preparation for wise, penetrative, candid 
exposition. To accept Revelation on reason or under 
reason, and yet to put its fundamental methods so at war 
with the moral reason, that we must pass reason by as a 
condition precedent for their examination, is to introduce 
such a struggle of tendencies, such a conflict of arguments 
as greatly to damage our entire cause. While our proof 
works inward toward Revelation, it must also work outward 
from Revelation. Authority must be sustained by its 
fitness, or it is lost as authority. 

Those who rest their belief in eternal punishment on 
the Word of God, seem to us to assert quite too much, to 
overlook in part the scope of Scriptural enforcement, and 
to lose sight of primary truths in the details of expression, 
the incidents of their unfolding. The facts that the doctrine 
of annihilation can also be urged with decisive vigor by 
precisely the same methods, and that a belief in restora- 
tion has its explicit, sweeping passages, go far to show 
in each case a mistaken or misapplied method of inquiry. 
Each party constructs its bulwark of texts, each by textual 
interpretation does more or less violence to the texts of its 
adversaries, and all forget that two classes of texts as texts 
can not bear down a third class. Texts are not gens 
d^armes deciding the conflict by numbers. Reason must 
show the relations of each assertion, and their lines of 
subordination. The two may as certainly yield to the one 
as the one to the two. A mind grounded, stranded, on a 
textual exegesis, is so far incapable of understanding the 
Bible as to put itself beyond the range of argument, is so 
far incapable of motion as to submit itself neither to wind 
nor water. There lies back of its present attitude a 



FUTURE LIFE. 507 

method of education which must be undone and re-done 
before insight is possible. 

Falling in one Sabbath afternoon with a fairly intelligent 
Shaker, near a thriving settlement of that community, I 
threw out, in conversation, a gentle inquiry by way of 
sounding his religious thoughts, and mapping their chan- 
nels. He replied at once, in justification of the celibacy 
of their community, " If any man come to me, and hate 
not his father and mother and wife and children and breth- 
ren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be 
my disciple."* The example is extreme, and so betrays 
only the more completely a frame of mind so irrational as 
to be quite beyond the reach of argument. The texts of 
such a disputant are the stones in his sling, which owe 
their execution not to their own weight, but to the violence 
with which they are hurled. A verbal coherence is all that 
the debater requires, the rest is force of will. 

If we consider in order the passages in the Gospel of 
Mathew touching on the future condition of the wicked, — 
and this gospel is especially full on the theme — we shall 
see how capable they are of separate, textual perversion ; 
and how collective, and how broad must be the view which 
harmonizes them by dropping them down from a general 
unqualified assertion each to its specific office. We first 
notice some important hints to a correct rendering of the 
words of Christ in reference to a future life. They have a 
practical, preceptive force rather than a didactic, explana- 
tory one. The facts are referred to, not as matter to be 
confirmed or expounded, but as admitted truths, bearing 
on immediate action. The language is peculiarly figura- 
tive, and accepts the limits of thought involved in the 
figures ; the figures rule the formal presentation. These 
figures are comparatively few, return more or less fre- 
* Luke xiv, 26. 



508 a philosophy of religion. 

quently, and had evidently acquired, or were acquiring, a 
conventional force. The various passages thus fall into a 
few groups, with a marked tendency in some groups to a 
set phraseology, attached to one or other of the current 
images. 

The first group is composed as follows. " And now 
also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees ; therefore 
every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn 
down, and cast into the fire " hi, 10. " Whose fan is in his 
hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather 
his wheat into his garner ; but he will burn up the chaff 
with unquenchable fire " iii, 12. " Enter ye in at the strait 
gate : for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that 
leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in there- 
at " vii, 13. " Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit 
is hewn down and cast into the fire " vii, 19. " And the 
rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, 
and beat upon that house ; and it fell ; and great was the 
fall of it " vii, 27. u But he said, Nay ; lest while ye gather 
up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both 
grow together until the harvest ; and in the time of harvest 
I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, 
and bind them in bundles to burn them ; but gather the 
wheat into my barn " xiii, 29, 30. There is considerable 
variety in these images, yet they are closely allied in form, 
and closely united in purpose. They emphasize the criti- 
cal, dividing processes going on in the Jewish nation and 
in the spiritual world, and about to issue in the deeper, 
broader divisions of a future life. As to the kind of over- 
throw which awaits the wicked, the thought accepts the 
particular figure employed, and this, whether of fire or of 
v/ater, suggests annihilation. But as this suggestion in- 
heres in the image, and not in the thought, it has scarcely 
a perceptible force. 



FUTURE LIFE. 509 

A second group includes the following passages : 
" And I say unto you, That many shall come from the 
east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and 
Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven ; but the 
children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer dark- 
ness : there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth " viii, n, 

12. " And when the king came in to see the guests, he 
saw there a man which had not on a wedding-garment ; 
and he saith unto him, Friend, how earnest thou in hither, 
not having a wedding-garment ? And he was speechless. 
Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and 
foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, 
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth " xxii, n, 12, 

13. " The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he 
looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware 
of, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion 
with the hypocrites ; there shall be weeping and gnashing 
of teeth " xxiv, 50, 51. " And cast ye the unprofitable ser- 
vant — him who had buried his talent — into outer darkness ; 
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth " xxv, 30. 
Here also the language takes its form from the illustrations 
and settles into two phrases, outer darkness and weeping 
and gnashing of teeth. The outer darkness stands con- 
trasted with the marriage feast, the household of the 
master, the kingdom of God. In consistency with this 
representation, recurs, in uniform sequence, There shall be 
weeping and gnashing of teeth, a phrase expressing the 
mingled grief and anger of the rejected ones. How firm 
this phraseology became, and how definite its associations, 
is shown by two other passages which unite it with an 
image that does not so directly carry it, though not incon- 
sistent with it, " The son of man shall send forth his 
angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things 
that offend, and them which do iniquity ; and shall cast 



5IO A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

them into a furnace of fire ; there shall be wailing and 
gnashing of teeth" xiii, 41 , 42. " So shall it be at the end 
of the world ; the angels shall come forth, and sever the 
wicked from the just, and shall cast them into the furnace 
of fire ; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth " xiii, 

49> 5°- 

These texts in consequence of this union, are some- 
what incongruous. Outer darkness is a more suitable 
image in connection with grief and anger than is a furnace 
of fire. These passages, therefore, taken by themselves, 
might seem to be suggestive of protracted punishment, 
overbearing the conclusion of a quick retribution, indicated 
by a furnace of fire. But the primary thought lies else- 
where, the images are still under their own independent 
form, and the phrase, already sufficiently interpreted other- 
wise, may be attached, though less fittingly, to the speedy 
punishment of fire. None of these representations are of 
a nature to be put to the rack, to be questioned by infer- 
ence, to be expanded by indirections, and if so used, they 
lead as easily to the doctrine of annihilation as to that of 
eternal punishment. 

A third remarkable group, approaching the question 
in hand more nearly, may best be introduced by a passage 
from Mark. " If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is 
better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two 
hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be 
quenched ; where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not 
quenched " ix, 43, 44. There immediately follow two 
other illustrations, closing with the same language. To 
these are to be added the kindred representations in 
Matthew. " If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and 
cast it from thee ; for it is profitable for thee that one of 
thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body 
should be cast into hell " v, 29. Similar language is used 



FUTURE LIFE. 511 

in the next verse concerning the right hand. On other 
occasions the language is modified by substituting hell-fire 
for hell, Matthew v, 22 and xviii, 9. These passages show 
their relation to each other by the use of the same word, 
Gehenna, translated hell. The word, its suggestions and 
imagery, are historical, not parabolic. They find their ex- 
planation in the facts of Jewish history, and in current 
Jewish belief, and not in figures open by their very nature 
to every mind. Gehenna, or the valley of Hinnom, had 
by a series of events, acquired a religious character, a 
representative force which now carried the word quite be- 
yond its first meaning. In the same way, Mount Sinai, 
Mount Zion, and Jerusalem had a figurative value beyond 
their direct application. This valley opposed in position 
to Mount Zion, had been made by Manasseh the seat of 
the worship of Moloch. In consequence of this, it had 
been defiled by Josiah, cursed by the prophet Jeremiah, 
and used as the image of God's judgments. Gehenna, or 
the valley of Hinnom, had thus come to be more than the 
name of an adjacent locality, had gained a peculiar, figu- 
rative value, was associated with ideas that found fitting 
expression in its facts, yet quite transcended them. Made 
the receptacle of the filth of the city, of dead animals fed 
on by worms or consumed by fire, it easily furnished an 
imagery of death other than physical, and flames more 
than natural. This current image of divine judgment, this 
local presentation of a field of punishment as contrasted 
with Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ employs ; 
and doubtless much in the form in which he found it. He 
introduces it without explanation, passes not beyond its 
suggestions, and drops it without comment. Hell is the 
Gehenna of execration, the place of defilement, of unclean 
things, unquenched fires, and undying worms. In one 
assertion it is the Gehenna of fire, in the associated pas- 



512 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

sage it is everlasting fire, fires perpetually fed by the ever 
returning filth of the city ; or, in the deeper fact that lies 
back of the images, hell is the Gehenna of incessant pun- 
ishment following upon incessant sin, the ordination as 
lasting as the fact. Gehenna takes the adjective ever- 
lasting, (Matt, xviii, 8) as it takes the limitation, the 
Gehenna of fire ; (Matt, xviii, 9) by virtue of its peculiar 
and permanent character, its settled facts and relations. 
We are also, in weighing the force of the adjective, ever- 
lasting, to remember, that the valley was the image as 
much of national judgments as of personal punishments, 
and so of necessity carries, in a portion of its religious 
force, the idea of temporal and temporary evils. The ever- 
lasting attaches to the relation and the principle the valley 
expresses, rather than to the incidents of its history, the 
punishments made to transpire in it. If we regard the 
limitations throwm about the words of Christ; first, by the 
direct moral lesson they were brought forward to enforce ; 
second, by the conventional character of the language 
used ; and third, by the imagery itself in its own nature 
and historic force, we must certainly be slow to affirm, that 
there is here any declaration beyond the fact and certainty 
of punishment, or that its limits are, or were intended to 
be, settled by it. It may be thought that the foundation 
for the statement, that fires were maintained in the valley 
of Hinnom for the consumption of offal, is slight. This is 
tiue, but the language, "Where the worm dieth not and 
the fire is not quenched," is of so fixed and so peculiar a 
nature, the images of a fire and a worm are so incongruous 
with each other as to call for a historic explanation, and 
to lend probability to a plausible one. The images help 
the statement, as the statement reconciles the images and 
unites them with Gehenna. This rendering also gathers 
strong confirmation from Is. lxvi, 24. " And they shall 



FUTURE LIFE. 513 

go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have 
transgressed against me : for their worm shall not die, 
neither shall their fire be quenched : and they shall be an 
abhorring unto all flesh." Evidently the words, " the worm 
dieth not and the fire is not quenched," had found currency 
before the time of Christ, and rested for explanation on a 
definite physical fact, and probably a general custom. 

There remain in Matthew but two other passages, 
"Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart 
from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the 
devil and his angels " xxv, 41. "And these shall go away 
into everlasting punishment ; but the righteous into life 
eternal " xxv, 46. These words take their color from the 
image of the last group of texts. Did not the language of 
our Saviour on this subject return so constantly to a few 
forms, we should not feel this to be true. If his words 
were variable, suggested by each new occasion; if they 
passed easily beyond current ideas and current expression ; 
if, disregarding the prevalent convictions, they entered 
freely by way of disclosure into the facts and their method, 
then we might regard the language, everlasting fire, ever- 
lasting punishment, as fresh additive assertions, even though 
standing somewhat alone. If, however, we remark how 
closely the words of Christ, in each instance, return to 
definite images, current convictions, fixed phraseology, as 
if he picked up the expression, the thought nearest him, 
by way simply of enforcement, we shall almost necessarily 
associate these slightly modified phrases with previous 
ones, and the eternal fire of Matt, xxv, 41, becomes the 
eternal fire of Matt, xviii, 8, while this is the fire of 
Gehenna. The correlative expression of the 46th verse 
then receives the same measurement, the language of this 
twenty-fifth chapter falls into harmony with that elsewhere 
employed, and is explained by the facts and imagery of 



514 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

the valley of Hinnom. If this be true, there is here no 
affirmation concerning the issues, methods, or limits of 
punishment, but only of the settled fact of punishment. 
But should we venture to push the texts to their logical 
limits, we arrive at annihilation quite as easily as at eternal 
punishment. If we take the forty-first verse as an initia- 
tive, which it is by position, destruction would seem to 
follow naturally from the image used. This is the action 
of fire, and if its most direct and natural results are to be 
reversed, it would seem that it must be done by plain indi- 
cation. The adjective everlasting is not such an indica- 
tion. Fires may be everlasting, though the material of 
them is rapidly consumed. A process and a principle may 
be eternal, though the stages of the one or the applications 
of the other are transient. In reference to the primary 
purpose, the announcement of judgment, judgment for 
transgressors, evidently this certainty, this eternity of prin- 
ciple, expressed in the eternity of the agencies that execute 
it, is quite as directly in order as a deterrent, as would be 
the other fact, if a fact, of the duration of punishment. 
It is also one which may be as certainly contained in the 
language, and may as readily exhaust it. Considering, 
therefore, the conflict of inferences in the language of the 
New Testament if we enter upon them, and that they all 
are but inferences, inferences not included in the primary 
purpose, the safer, sounder, more conservative opinion is, 
that the general method of Revelation is applicable also 
to the words of Christ, and that he busies himself with 
principles, primary truths, to the oversight of details hav- 
ing little to do with action, and either involved in the 
moral government enforced, or properly waiting on the 
unfolding of time. We are the more persuaded of this, 
when we reflect how easy and natural it would have been 
to set at rest the doubt now honestly entertained as to the 



FUTURE LIFE. 515 

fact of the hopelessness and eternity of future punishments, 
it this had really been the topic under consideration ; and 
how greatly moral principles demand such a settlement, if 
the conclusion to be reached is one so antagonistic to 
them as this of their total and speedy arrest. If moral 
laws are to have full sweep, then their details of execution 
are secondary in importance, but if these details are to 
overbear those laws, that fact calls for speedy and decisive 
announcement, as altering all the conditions of conduct. 
We are certainly to infer the permanence of moral laws 
in the absence of satisfactory proof to the contrary. 

There is a passage in Matthew whose inferences lead 
us to farther probation. " Whosoever speaketh a word 
against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him ; but who- 
soever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be 
forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to 
come " xii, 32. We do not urge the conclusion because it 
is in the text a side issue. There is also a significant fact 
presented by J. J. Murphy in The Scientific Bases of Faith. 
The adjective eternal is never applied to death. The 
antithesis to eternal life so naturally made thereby is not 
made. " What fruit had ye then in those things whereof 
ye are now ashamed ? for the end of those things is death. 
But now being made free from sin, and become servants 
to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end eter- 
nal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God 
is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. "* 

" A three-fold contrast is here indicated \ wages and gift, 
sin and God, death, not necessarily eternal, and eternal life. 
It seems impossible to understand why St. Paul should 
have avoided the use of so appropriate, so impressive, and 
so self-suggesting an expression as eternal death would 
have been in such a place as this, had he believed the 
* Rom. vi, 21-23. 



$l6 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

meaning it conveyed to be true. No doubt a single nega- 
tive instance is seldom conclusive ; and for that reason I 
go on to quote others.''* He then cites, Rom. v, 21 ; 
Rom. ii, 5-10; Gal. vi, 8. 

We have dealt with one Evangelist, not as exhausting, 
but as fairly representing the Scriptural argument, and as 
indicating the spirit of the exegesis which leads to the 
conclusion that the Scriptures enforce a future life as the 
continuation of this life, as holding its moral issues, and 
confine themselves to this fundamental preceptive or prac- 
tical fact. We are thus left in our anticipations under our 
moral constitution, waiting on its laws as paths of life, 
and compelled to search deeply into its principles for our 
guidance. Revelation forces us back on nature, a nature 
of divine ordination for our discipline. In other words, it 
restores our feet to the very highways which from the 
beginning were thrown up for us, but from which we had 
strayed. What we venture to suggest concerning the con- 
ditions of a future life, concerning the resurrection, is not 
offered as a doctrine. Beyond the fact of a future life, a 
resurrection as involved therein, — something quite diverse 
from what is usually asserted under the word — and con- 
tinuous treatment under a progressive spiritual law, the 
data are too meagre and insecure to offer us final conclu- 
sions. It is rather our desire to escape such conclusions, 
standing as many of them do in the way of rational thought, 
hampering moral principles, and turning into unqualified 
assertions forms of statement incident to a peculiar phase 
of religious life. Dogmas that interrupt growth, the free 
expansion of principles, insights, hopes, as they pertain 
either to the character of God or our development under 
his government, are to be deprecated. A field closed by 
inadequate statements we have striven to open, and have 
f p. 428. 



FUTURE LIFE. 517 

no desire to reclose it by other insufficient presentations. 
The mind must be at liberty to entertain its own best sug- 
gestions under the truth present to it. To allow these in 
turn to become inflexible is to renew the labor now gone 
through with. Dogma does its true work when it is the 
fruit of progress, ministers in turn to progress, and gives 
way to progress. The forms of facts that are so much 
beyond us as those of a future life, must remain peculiarly 
flexible, leaving at all times and under all lights the funda- 
mental principles of a moral discipline freely operative. 

We object to the doctrines of eternal punishment, 
annihilation and restoration, because they pronounce on 
results dogmatically with insufficient proof; and because 
they interpose their positive statements in the path of free, 
spiritual development. Each of them constrains and limits 
the moral forces though they do it very unequally, restora- 
tion less than annihilation, and annihilation less than 
eternal punishment. This dogma lies directly athwart the 
line of spiritual unfolding. Few spectacles would be more 
barren morally, nay more repulsive morally, than eternal 
punishment without the opportunity of repentance ; gov- 
ernment cut short in every line of influence save that of 
infliction. Punishment so imposed drops for the parties 
directly implicated every element of discipline, ceases to 
flow from an existing moral state infolding and handling 
moral forces, and is simply a dreadful deterrent to trans- 
gression, provided with vast expenditure of suffering, for 
those who have not so stumbled and fallen. So far as any 
moral influence is referable to it, it is the very lowest, and 
must issue in a spiritual state of the same low description. 
But who are these parties who need such fearful restraint 
put upon them at the expense of others ? for whom is 
this lesson provided ? We trust not the holy in Heaven, 
while they can scarcely be the impenitent on earth. This 



518 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

would be inconsistent with the scheme, as the eternity of 
punishment ought not to be requisite to impress those who 
take part in so transient a state of things as the earthly 
one is thought to be ; it would be a terrible entail to follow 
on forever after these transactions had been closed. More- 
over, if this be the end of punishment, hell should be 
uncovered to our view, not hidden from it ; the slightest 
economy and kindness would teach us this. Those who 
defend such a disastrous, such an increasingly dreadful 
issue, one that quickly palls on the moral perception from 
its unwearying, unwavering intensity, retreat shortly to the 
idea of justice as its sufficient reason. This sentiment 
refuses to accept and sustain such a result. If we allow 
justice as a simple impulse to press directly toward its own 
object, uncontrolled by wisdom, inflexible to other ends, it 
still can not explain infinite punishment as attached with- 
out remedy to the sins of this life. No single sin, as one 
act, can deserve infinite punishment. That it does so is 
an assertion quite arbitrary. Sin can not get a scope 
beyond its finite, restricted conditions. It can not be one 
thing to the mind that commits it, and another thing 
wholly in the retributions that follow it. Sin is defined by 
the free, intelligent act which makes it to be sin ; sin in a 
feeble, blind spirit can not, therefore, at once waste the 
righteousness of Heaven or weary it, nor at once contract 
the guilt of hell. Sin measures itself in the conscious 
resistance it offers to holiness, and requires time for growth, 
time wherein to strengthen itself, precisely as does right- 
eousness. If justice annexed such results to one sin, it 
would have no sufficient reserve of resources with which to 
treat later sins. Sin sinks in scope to the soul that com- 
mits it, and can not, in a sudden, unforeseen way, plunge a 
soul into hell. There is here such a confusion of ideas as 
to rob Our moral nature of all soberness and proportion, 



FUTURE LIFE. 519 

as to make of it a most fearful riddle. Blindness and sud- 
denness reduce sin — one may stumble in the dark — and 
put limitation on punishment. The moment we allow 
justice to slip the restraints of wisdom, we find ourselves 
juggling with words. We are led to say that sin against 
an infinite law demands an infinite penalty, and we handle 
our sanctions in tricksy fashion as weights wherewith we 
bring our moral mechanism to equilibrium, not as methods 
whereby men are schooled in God's wisdom and love. 

"No subtlety of logic, no weight of authority, will 
induce rightly constituted minds, which allow themselves 
to reason at all, to admit that the sins or failings of Time 
ca?i merit the retribution of eternity — that finite natures 
can, by any guilt of which they are capable, draw upon 
themselves torments infinite either in essence or duration. 
Divines tell us — and we all accept the saying — that no 
virtue on the part of frail and feeble creatures like our- 
selves can merit an eternal Heaven ; but when they demand 
our assent to the opposite and contradictory assertion that 
the shortcomings and backslidings of the same creatures 
can and do merit an everlasting hell, we are revolted by 
the inconsistency, and shrink back from the corollary 
involved in the latter proposition."* The truth is we can 
no more regard hell as a matter of merits than Heaven. 
A system of merits and demerits is quite too narrow to 
measure, quite too weak to curb, moral forces. 

Punishment as a moral agency, as a just and also a 
wise agency, follows naturally and closely upon sin ; is a 
disclosure of its character, tends to arrest sin, instructs the 
sinner, deters the spectator, and struggles to restore all 
feet to the law. It is as redemptive as grace and forgive- 
ness, is harsh only because it deals with violent agents, 
and fails only because the sinner will not suffer rebuke. 
* Enigmas of Life, p. 271. 



520 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Positive inflictions serve only to hasten the disclosures, 
quicken the remedies, and emphasize the lessons of natural 
law, pushing them at once into the foreground, and articu- 
lating them in command. Punishment, in reference to 
him who suffers it, him who inflicts it, him who beholds it, 
admits of no other ends in a righteous government — one 
that loves righteousness, not one that simply declines to 
sin — than this of redemption. In human government 
punishment may sink to the low level of fear, of constraint ; 
but there is in it, so used, no spring to virtue, no regenera- 
tive vigor ; it is fortunate if it becomes even a dead-lock 
in the decline to vice. 

The punishments of another life, to maintain their 
moral vigor, to present themselves as new issues under 
progressive procedure, as new revelation in spiritual devel- 
opment, must be dealing not with the sins of a remote 
past, but with the sinner of the hour, fitting his conditions 
to the tendencies, perceptions, possibilities present to him, 
allowing the disasters of sin to submerge and resubmerge 
him as the sins return, and giving to the lost germs of life 
whatever quickening influence they are capable of receiv- 
ing. The sinner is thus punished not merely because he 
has been a sinner, but because he is a sinner, and is still 
battling with the laws of life. The fruits of sin are not 
arbitrary, they are not separable from sin itself, they are 
not a product of will, even the divine will, but of wisdom, 
even the divine wisdom, expressed in the spiritual, and the 
concurrent physical, constitution of the world. Punish- 
ment relaxes as disobedience relaxes, and reward takes 
its place as righteousness intervenes. In the precise 
degree in which we make punishment an infliction, resting 
on the will of the ruler, in which we separate it from the 
sin on the grounds of which it is imposed ; in the degree 
in which we make fear its moral force, do we obscure the 



FUTURE LIFE. 521 

spiritual history of the world, and put back spiritual growth. 
The region of fear is behind us, not before us. Fear, by 
its implication with higher forces, does subserve a moral 
purpose, but a very limited one. The plough that breaks 
up the soil has little to do with the cultivation that follows. 
To re-plough the sown field is to destroy the seed. To 
introduce fear afresh, when the mind is coming under the 
persuasion of truth and love, is to arrest or to disturb its 
living processes. Fear so used obscures the motives to 
obedience, represses the affections ready to break forth, 
and cuts short the experience in its truly spiritual 
features. 

Many are fearful of reducing the motives to obedience 
by a view of punishment which appeals less directly and 
unreservedly to the sense of danger than this of instant 
and final damnation. They forget many things. They 
forget the punishments involved in sin itself under the 
divine law, and fail to urge them. Their attention is 
occupied by positive penalties to the oversight of natural 
ones. The dreadful character of sin thus gives place to 
the dreadful consequences of sin, and its disasters are 
traced not to itself but to an exterior ordinance. The sin- 
ner is ruined, but owes his ruin not so much to himself as 
to God. They forget how quickly the soul, if it shall yield 
to fear, and seek God, will require wisdom, love, patience, 
to feed its piety ; and how wholly diverse must be that 
later presentation which is to call out and cherish its affec- 
tions from this earlier one, thought so efficient in initiating 
its religious life. They forget how little, after all, fear 
accomplishes, how few are arrested by it, how certainly, as 
a motive, it is overworked, punishment becoming remote, 
unreal, incredible from the dreadful stress put upon it, and 
how frequently those inclined by it to obedience fall off 
again because of the poor, hard conditions which accom- 



522 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

pany its presentation. It behooves us always to inquire, 
in a simple way, into truth, believing that truth will justify 
itself in its fruits. Aside from this, can we afford to yield 
so much to fear, to so obscure by it the spiritual law, the 
character and the love of God ? Can we profit by a retreat 
to the Inferno of Dante as our religious arsenal ? The 
terrors by which a flock are frightened into a fold may 
lead them to leap its inclosure at the first opportunity. 
We shall do well to provide less for conversion, often a 
disappointing process, and do more for sanctification, 
which is sure to draw all things after it with a divine power. 

If the doctrine of eternal punishment is the foundation 
of religion, is "the basis of the missionary system," then 
religion and the missionary system are by so much less 
exalted than we thought them. It is our one great objec- 
tion to the doctrine, that, with its retinue of fears, it pushes 
into the foreground, displaces moral forces, disturbs the 
affections, makes callous the soul first to gentler truths, 
then to all truths by the concentration and heat of its 
motives, and, if seemingly strong to initiate a movement, 
has no power to direct and sustain it. We can wait for 
missionaries of love and salvation till they come, till they 
are drawn onward as much by the things to be won as by 
those to be escaped, till that which attracts them is holi- 
ness, and that which repels them is sin. 

We believe that Christianity so far has suffered, and 
grievously suffered, by the undue weight given to fear, by 
the induration incident to it, by the obscuration and distor- 
tion of higher truths. It is possible, as we all know, to 
brighten the flames of hell with a very human and very 
devilish breath. The doctrine has been as much indebted, 
we fear, for its prevalence to what is tyrannical and cruel 
in the human heart as to what is just and merciful in it. 
It was not an accident that it culminated in intensity of 



FUTURE LIFE. 523 

delineation in the mediaeval church ; that Dante became 
its prophet. Certain it is that in our time it has often stood 
in the way of pure, gentle and heavenly sensibilities. " I 
have never seen a particle of light thrown on these sub- 
jects, that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind ; 
nor have I an explanation to offer, or a thought to suggest, 
that would be of relief to you. I trust other men — as they 
profess to do — understand this better than I do, and that 
they have not the anguish of spirit which I have ; but I 
confess, when I look on a world of sinners and of sufferers ; 
upon death-beds and grave-yards ; upon the world of woe 
filled with hosts to suffer forever ; when I see my friends, 
my parents, my family, my people, my fellow-citizens ; 
when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and 
danger, and when I see the great mass of them wholly 
unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save 
them, and yet He does not do it — I am struck dumb. It 
is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I can not disguise 
it."* It is plain that this darkness stood opposed to the 
light of the moral, the religious nature, and was deepened, 
greatly deepened, by prevalent exegesis. Yet this result 
is far better than the opposite one, a quiet acceptance of 
the alleged truths. 

Certain is it also, that many have declined to believe 
in the real disasters of sin because pressed with these 
fictitious ones, and have either denied altogether future 
punishment, or given it a purely formal assent. " Though 
theologians have virtually all but destroyed popular faith 
in the conventional place of punishment by the language 
in which they have habitually described it, and the incredi- 
bilities with which they have mixed it up, surely, surely it 
is not impossible to imagine a future world of retribution 

* Albert Barnes, Practical Sermons, pp. 123, 128 ; C. F. Hud- 
son's Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 55. 



524 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

in such form and coloring as shall be easy and natural to 
realize, as shall be, not only possible to believe, but impos- 
sible to disbelieve ; a world of which we shall feel that, if 
it exist at all, it must be such as we delineate." * This 
freedom to expand our thoughts is the freedom to work 
out spiritual problems, and carry on spiritual life. 

The doctrine of annihilation we can not accept; it 
also lacks explicit proof, and throws unnecessary limita- 
tions on moral movements. Human spirits are passing 
onward with tendencies undeveloped, issues not made up ; 
we see no reason for pronouncing flexible, growing pro- 
cesses complete at a certain line, the bound of life ; and 
settling, in an off-hand way, all questions on the basis of 
this assertion. Here, too, dogma enters in to disturb moral 
forces, whose development it is its sole purpose to explain. 
A belief in the final restitution of all is far more admissi- 
ble as far more concurrent with our moral sentiments. 
Yet it seems to us to lack that degree of proof necessary 
to make of it a doctrine. If repentance is always possible, 
equally so is disobedience. If punishment brings instruc- 
tion and rebuke, so does the sin punished pervert the per- 
ceptions and deaden the sensibilities. Sin works toward 
extinction, destruction in the physical, the intellectual, and 
the moral constitution ; that it may not in some instances 
reach it, who can say? The universe may free itself in 
more ways than one. Sin may be eliminated by obedience 
and disobedience alike, though at opposite ends of the 
scale of life. Sin, when it is finished, may bring forth 
death. While punishment is redemptive, sin is destruc- 
tive ; the two war with each other, nor can we certainly, in 
each case, give the victory to one or the other. We would 
gladly affirm restoration, but the deadly nature of sin is 
too great to allow us. 

* Enigmas of Life, p. 275. 



FUTURE LIFE. 525 

The same line of thought precludes our asserting the 
immediate sinlessness of the saved. Our fundamental 
principles are, that God's government is continuous, with 
its laws and forces planted in the human soul ; that another 
life is united in natural sequence to this life; that its con- 
ditions and directions are in completion of those here 
established ; that righteousness is righteousness, to wit, the 
activity of a mind and heart lifted by insight and choice 
into obedience ; that the coherence of moral truths, the con- 
sistency of the divine character, the consecutiveness of 
government, and so of discipline under it, constitute our 
guide to the future, as they do to the lines of obedience 
here ; and that they express toward us, and concentrate 
upon us, the pleasure of God. Sin then is possible in 
Heaven, is actual there, not as a predominant impulse, but 
as a desultory or a defective one. In other words, proba- 
tion, activity, the mastery of our own lives, are not lost 
to us either as obedient or disobedient in another life. 
God no more constrains holiness than he constrains sin ; 
he no more supplements feeble powers in obedience than 
he removes them in disobedience, no more performs for us 
the neglected work of life than deters us from ourselves 
undertaking it. New companionships, new and better 
external conditions, constitutional conditions, may do 
something, they can not alter the essential nature of virtue, 
nor make the imperfect the perfect spirit. They are aids, 
not powers. We fear that a belief in sinlessness is some- 
times due to a spirit that shirks its own labors under the 
appearance of honoring the gifts of God. We stand for 
law, God's law, which is full, however, of his mercies. 

This view does not seem to us to be untrue to the 
Scriptures ; while the opposite view seems to us the result 
of those complex obscurations and entanglements of spirit- 
ual truths which follow from regarding holiness itself as a 



526 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

gift, and moral states as subjects of decree and outside 
settlement. If we infringe upon the integrity of moral 
states, the moral life shrinks away, and the moral problem 
becomes a physical or governmental adjustment quite alien 
to itself. If righteousness is exclusively the product of the 
soul's activity, incident to that activity, and quite beyond 
the range of power ; if spiritual activity is the product of 
every divine gift truly appropriated, and the condition of 
each farther gift to be appropriated ; if growing activities 
constitute the first term in growing blessedness, as we 
believe them to do, then the soul's choices can not cease 
with death, nor can the soul desire them to be shaped 
otherwise than by its own renewing and renewed effort. 
The fundamental fact in the present spiritual system is 
growth, a voluntary concurrence with living forces, but 
error, deficiency, vacillation are incident to growth, since 
under it affections follow upon insights, and actions upon 
both, renewing again the circuits of life. But hesitancy 
and delay are incident, and must remain incident, to the 
voluntary, complex changes that fall to human character. 
A sufficient and unwavering line of progress would belong 
to a complete, not to a partial, nature ; one perfected by 
growth, rather than one being perfected under growth. 
Growth is higher adaptation, hence implies the need of it ; 
is a present state conditioned by the deficiencies of a pre- 
vious one, and so one that can not be cut loose from its 
inheritances. 

The entire instruction of the Bible, all proportioning of 
moral results to moral activities, proceed on the supposi- 
tion that the entail of sin is not one that can be arbitrarily 
cut short. If holiness were a gift, an equal and common 
gift to the redeemed, then might it bring equal and com- 
mon happiness ; but as a variable product, it must yield 
variable results. It does yield variable results every hour. 



FUTURE LIFE. 527 

When shall this, its essential nature, be changed ? If we 
are pressed by single passages that seem directly to ex- 
clude sin from Heaven, we ask for a wider interpretation 
of them, akin to that we give to other passages touching a 
like point. ' Indeed, the assertion of sinlessness is more 
explicit in reference to this life than in reference to another. 
"We know that whosoever is born of God, sinneth not; 
but he that is begotten of God, keepeth himself, and that 
wicked one toucheth him not."* There is really no diffi- 
culty in this assertion ; a movement is characterized by 
features which belong to it in its perfect form, rather than 
by those which belong to it in its partial form ; it is spoken 
of under its own results, rather than under results asso- 
ciated with it, but alien to it. But if this sinlessness can 
be affirmed of the begotten of God under present condi- 
tions without carrying with it the perfection of the religious 
life, it may also in a future state. 

If it be said that we reason from natural and transient 
to supernatural and permanent facts in a very direct 
anthropomorphic way, we in fact assent to the statement 
and find our certainty in this close coherence of method. 
We are afraid of an argument that infers the being of God 
from a moral government in the world, and then subverts 
that government by the character of God. The super- 
natural, secondary as it is in thought, proof, and relation, 
to the natural, can not stand, save as it is organically 
united to this body of law about us. This has been the 
drift of all we have said, and must be the drift of any 
rational procedure, finding its data in known facts. Yet 
we are quite willing often to fall back on the phrase, It 
seems to us, as we are imposing no doctrine, and the value 
of what we say must be found in the light it gives to the 
mind which receives it. It is the coherence of truths that 
* I John, v, 18. 



528 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

we are in search of, and here alone it is that we offer aid, 
and to those only who feel some need of it. In this effort, 
the Scriptures are not comprehensive truths inclosing and 
expounding all others, but coordinate truths, to be inclosed 
with others in one system. 

There remain two points in reference to which the 
Christian church, chiefly under the guidance of the sacred 
writers, have shaped a creed, — the judgment and the resur- 
rection. It has been very difficult to frame a satisfactory 
faith on these points, especially the last The difficulty 
has arisen from an exegesis too closely bound to the frame- 
work of thought, to material and transitional ideas ; too 
little penetrative into the spirit of truth, too little appre- 
hensive of the breadth of its work. Nothing but a strong 
tendency to literalism would lead us to regard the day of 
judgment, referred to in the Word of God, as the precise 
statement of a fact. The New Jerusalem, with its gates 
of pearl, its streets of gold, its tree of life, its walls equal 
in length and breadth and height, is hardly more figurative, 
hardly more beyond the range of coherent things. A judg- 
ment-day approaches a physical impossibility, and, as a 
transaction within the scope of the human mind, is cer- 
tainly a moral one. The great throne, the vast throng, the 
open books, though fitting images, would be most incon- 
gruous and unmanageable facts, so incongruous as to 
make it a trespass on reason to entertain them as a bald 
assertion. What means could gather such an assembly, 
what natural forces control it, what purpose be met by it j 
what human thought, by way of instruction, could take in 
its procedure ? It would be an irreconcilable medley of the 
natural and supernatural, an effort to reach knowledge and 
impression by a method incoherent, and, judged by the 
normal powers of the mind, preposterous. Such discor- 
dant elements, the natural escaping at every point into 



FUTURE LIFE. 529 

the supernatural, can only be kept together in vision- 
land. 

A day of judgment, and so of separation, is a single, 
collective picture of what transpires constantly and every- 
where in the searching and sifting government of God. 
Each goes, is ever going, to his own place, and needs not 
to be recalled thence, that he may be formally judged and 
restored hither. Judgment and penalty overtake the soul 
with no help from the halting, blundering forms of human 
justice. 

The doctrine of a resurrection, that is of a restoration 
of the dead, each to a body in some way intimately asso- 
ciated with the earthly body, the union to take place at 
some undefined future time known as the last day, is a 
belief closely allied with that of a day of judgment, is bur- 
dened with the same awkward concomitants, and arrests in 
a like aimless, futile way the continuous flow of moral 
forces. Passing the scientific impossibilities or improba- 
bilities, evaded if not removed by evoking the supernatural, 
and by declining to define the relation of the celestial to 
the terrestrial body, we are still incumbered with the incon- 
gruity of the entire conception. It is difficult to under- 
stand how any tangible connection can be established 
between a body raised at a remote period and this present 
body, rapidly dissolving and redissolving into the physical 
elements about it, or what possible purpose, physical or 
spiritual, could be subserved by such a connection ; what 
principle in either world could be made to turn upon it. 
It seems to us an assertion of immense difficulty and per- 
plexity made for no apparent purpose, and one that rests 
on language simply concessive to current opinion. A 
much greater embarrassment in this doctrine than that of 
adjuncts and conditions of whose possibilities we know so 
little, is the intermediate state of the dead implied in it, 
23 



530 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

and the halting of the events of eternity waiting upon the 
completion of those in time. This is man's mechanism, 
not the march of the thought and power of God. 

The world has stood long, it promises to stand much 
longer. The foundations of moral order are just appear- 
ing; the reconstructions of society remain chiefly to be 
made. From this system of things, of great, of indefinite, 
duration, the dead are divorced. Why should not their 
lives take up at once elsewhere their own issues, and carry 
them continuously forward? The imagination has at this 
point been very tyrannical. Men have been unable to 
conceive of life save in its associations with this life, and 
so have striven to interlace another state of being in its 
events with existing conditions. The results have been 
motley conceptions, the product of a fancy straitened by 
physical surroundings, and compelled to paint its heavenly 
picture in earthly colors. The spiritual doctrine of a future 
life constrains us to' assert an immediate restoration of 
conscious being, under conditions and forms quite unknown. 
The conception of a remote resurrection of the body is 
shaped in concession to physical influences, a failing 
imagination, and in opposition to a close, living, spiritual 
dependence, and to those intuitions of the moral nature 
which build the future. It may do well as transient 
imagery, it does poorly as permanent fact. This lapse 
of our spiritual life for an aeon, in the light of God's 
genetic, coherent methods, demands most explicit proof. 
If, however, the dead have a conscious and progressive 
life in an intermediate state, then a remote resurrection 
rules itself out as a superfluity ; since events will have 
passed quite beyond it. Inserted far on in the future, it 
could only be a disturbance, the reappearance of an effete 
force. 

But is there not much in the Word of God which con- 



FUTURE LIFE. 53 1 

strains this view ? It is hardly possible to construct a 
clear and coherent doctrine on this topic from Revelation 
under the guidance of textual exegesis. The reason is not 
difficult to be found. The doctrine of a future life is con- 
stantly implied and clearly asserted, and a doctrine of 
resurrection as incident thereto and associated therewith. 
But this concomitant fact, which, in a particular form, 
was so united to the belief in a future life that the two 
articles reciprocally canied the one the other, is not laid 
down with distinct definition. It is left, as to its nature 
and circumstances, to indirection and inference, w r hile the 
language employed is tinged by transient and Jewish 
beliefs. It can hardly be said, that the doctrine of a resur- 
rection, as disconnected from the associated idea of a 
future life, has any preceptive moral force, that any state- 
ment or principle is made to turn upon it. In other 
words, the doctrine of a resurrection is swallowed up in 
the doctrine of immortality, and receives no distinct didac- 
tic statement ; nor is it at any time made pivotal in the 
progress of truth. 

There must be limits to any Revelation. All religious 
truth can not be given, much less can all the bearings of 
religious truth. In fact, the portion that can at any one 
time be profitably given and received is very limited. If 
these bounds are passed, confusion and error are the 
result. Revelation, then, must have close restrictions ; 
but wherever these restrictions are placed, important truths 
will be approached, yet passed by. Along these limits 
inference will be at fault, since the truth or portion of 
truth involved in the topic, yet omitted from full didactic 
•statement, will remain under faulty, partial, conventional 
expression. Any process of definition must have an end, 
as every new definition will give us new and undefined 
words. It is often safer not to define at all than it is to 



532 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

enter on this effort, since the mind is thus put from the 
beginning on its powers of comprehension, and not for- 
saken in the midst of a movement. Language is left 
variable, and out of its variability the thoughts catch a 
subtile force not sufficiently held in any one precise word. 
To us Revelation seems to direct itself thus freely to gen- 
eral principles, to pregnant practical truths, to the existing 
exigencies of spiritual life, and to pass on either hand the 
details of facts, whether of science or of religion, whether 
of the physical construction of history in the past and 
present, or the spiritual construction of it in the future. 
These inquiries as aside from its purpose, aside from the 
knowledge of the time, aside often from the knowledge of 
the agents employed, would have been futile and disturb- 
ing. Revelation, instead of being the concentrate life and 
inspiration of the period, would have sunk to quite a 
secondary office, that of diffusing knowledge. 

The doctrine of a resurrection, in its formal features, its 
correctness or incorrectness of detail, is one of these mar- 
ginal truths. The cardinal assertion of a life beyond the 
grave is made, its conditions are left to expanding insight 
and to time. The spiritual life, like other lives, must 
clear itself of obstructions, — obstructions which, for the 
moments passing, were doubtless aids — and do its own 
work. 

We do not and can not accept that view of Revelation 
which makes its utterances precise statements, available to 
their utmost limits, along all lines of interpretation. There 
is more frequently but one resultant force, one resultant 
direction, and beyond this every thing is uncertain. On 
the subject of the resurrection there were special influences 
to shape the forms of expression, and color the imagery — 
the prevalent Jewish faith, and the second coming of 
Christ. The Jewish doctrine gave naturally the termi- 



FUTURE LIFE. 533 

nology of the New Testament, and subjected the thought 
to its suggestions. This was unavoidable without a direct 
effort of Christ to reconstruct thought and language on 
this topic. This he does not seem to have attempted, 
aside from a few very penetrative and suggestive words. 
There were two tendencies in Jewish faith which served to 
carry the resurrection forward, and add it as a distinct and 
peculiar event at the last day. The first of these was the 
vague, unreal, unjoyous impressions which attended, in the 
minds of the Jews, upon Sheol, the abode of the dead, 
the region of shades. There was nothing here, either in 
good or evil, tangible and firm enough to satisfy the feel- 
ings. The second tendency, strengthened by a belief in a 
New Jerusalem, and a Messianic kingdom, was that which 
led them to associate with this world the most substantial 
blessings, to " look for new heavens and a new earth." 
Their entire religious history had narrowed their horizon, 
leading them to catch at and covet the earthly image of 
the good, rather than the very good itself. To such feel- 
ings a resurrection of the body, and a restoration at some 
future period to the upper light of this world, were essen- 
tial. The fact of a future life was clear, but its times and 
circumstances were vague, shaped under a fancy clinging 
closely to this form of existence. 

The ease with which the disciples entertained the idea 
of a speedy second coming of Christ had its explanation 
in these same tendencies, going out in a new direction. 
The Messianic kingdom was to them a more spiritual, yet 
a temporal and visible one. A resurrection, a deferred 
reunion of the body and spirit, again came in to complete 
the prevailing bent of thought. The second coming was 
a rapidly approaching event, and one of an exterior, physi- 
cal character. This image is present with startling dis- 
tinctness to St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Thessa- 



534 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

lonians, chapter iv, 16 : "For the Lord himself shall 
descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the 
archangel, and with the trump of God \ and the dead in 
Christ shall rise first ; then we which are alive and remain 
shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to 
meet the Lord in the air : and so shall we ever be with 
the Lord." We see at once how much ruin would have 
been wrought if conceptions, containing the substance of 
truth, had been instantly and violently reshaped in exposi- 
tion to its methods and facts. 

When the subject of the resurrection was forced upon 
Christ by the Sadducees, he affirms the general truth, but 
with a proof derived from the Old Testament, that tended 
of itself to a searching reconstruction of the doctrine. 
The activity of God in his people, hence the perpetual 
activity of his people in him, is affirmed as a self-evident 
truth, an early insight into the relation of the soul to God. 
He lives in them, they live by him, and hence are perpetu- 
ally filled with his life. God can not be the God of the 
dead, but only the God of the living ; the intimacy of his 
relation to his children involves it. This argument would 
militate against any repose, any suspension of progress in 
Sheol • it means life and only life. 

The declaration of Christ on the cross to the thief by 
his side, " To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise " set- 
tles the question of immediate fellowship with Christ, of 
instant life in him ; and settles it on the basis which every 
earnest soul covets. The restfulness, it is safe to say the 
growing restfulness, of St. Paul implies this same expecta- 
tion. " We are confident, and willing rather to be absent 
from the body, and to be present with the Lord."* 

The doctrine of a future life then is brought forward 
quite aside from the doctrine of a resurrection as a remote 
* 2 Cor. v, 8. 



FUTURE LIFE. 535 

terminal event in the world's history, discloses its highest 
power to the spirit independently of such an issue, and 
robs that issue, when granted as a fact, of any peculiar 
religious significance. Such a doctrine stands more and 
more by itself, an isolated assertion, a supernumerary 
statement, which the spiritual nature in its hopes is ceas- 
ing to appropriate, is leaving behind, finding no place for 
it in a life instantly renewed and steadily maintained in 
Christ. Nor is it forced upon us by the Scriptures, if we 
are content to recognize in them the current, conventional 
element ; to regard the truth as pressed, moulded in its 
statement by surrounding opinion. The language of our 
Saviour recurring repeatedly, "And I will raise him up at 
the last day," retains fully its primary, spiritual import, its 
promise, its encouragement none the less, nay more, from 
its conformity to current speech. The mind is not diverted 
by a new issue, but kept firm in the line of hope, and so 
of effort. 

There is one incident in our Saviour's life remarkable 
as casting some clear light on this subject of a resurrection. 
Martha was weighed down by grief at the death of her 
brother, and the office of consoler fell to Christ. Jesus 
utters these words of comfort, "Thy brother shall rise 
again." She, with little penetrative power, understands 
him to refer to the familiar encouragement of a resurrec- 
tion, and replies in ready recognition, "I know that he 
shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." To 
this Jesus makes answer more decisively, " I am the resur- 
rection, and the life ; he that believeth in me, though he 
were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and 
believeth in me, shall never die. Believest thou this?" 
The response of Martha, a confession of his Messiahship, 
betrays the vagueness of a mind ready to believe, unable 
to fully grasp the new hope, and so falling back on fami'ar 



53& A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

truth. The glorious continuity and strength of life, a life 
fed from the beginning to the end on the eternal life of 
Christ, was not a truth near enough to her experience to be 
laid hold of. Yet this truth remains for us. Christ can 
no more be stripped of the lives of his servants than of his 
own life. Death has no power over him or them. The 
victory is not remote but immediate. 

How little on this whole subject we can deal with lan- 
guage, or with the details of imagery, putting them in the 
place of the truth enforced : how unmistakably we are shut 
up to the spiritual significance and coherence of events, is 
well seen by a comparison of these passages of Scripture. 
" Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle 
me and see ; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye 
see me have." "Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and 
blood can not inherit the kingdom of God ; neither doth 
corruption inherit incorruption." " Who shall change our 
vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious 
body, according to the working whereby he is able even to 
subdue all things unto himself." Christ gave to his dis- 
ciples the farther proof of a real body, we might almost 
say a corruptible body, by eating before them. These 
passages^ taken together, would seem to exclude the body 
of Christ, after the resurrection, from Heaven, and make of 
it a temporary appearance ; and, at the same time, to 
affirm the likeness of the celestial body to the body of 
Christ, making his resurrection the ground of our resur- 
rection. " He that raised up Christ from the dead shall 
also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth 
in you." The sufficiency of each passage to its own pur- 
pose is not doubtful, while the language of them collect- 
ively is confusing, if not contradictory. We must walk, 
we are ever compelled anew to walk, by the counsel of the 
soul, the insight of the reason, and not by the coherence 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 537 

of the senses. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth 
life. This deadening power of the letter it may take a 
longer or a shorter time to develop, but it is sure at length 
to disclose itself. We can not mine language as if it were 
an exhaustless vein of thought ; our shafts are sinking 
deeper, and our galleries running farther, into the dark- 
ness. We must return to the light, and open new wealth 
at new localities. Our wisdom in reference to the truth is 
to accept it as a guide, and not to constrain it as we lay 
hold of it, not to take from it its office under the appear- 
ance of installing it in that office. We may drown, by too 
spasmodic a clutch, both ourselves arid him who would 
save us. 



CHAPTER XV. 
Lines and Conditions of Progress. 

THE religious corollary from the assertion. The Lord 
reigneth, is, Let the earth rejoice. No inconsider- 
able portion of the fruit of religious faith is the new, the 
enlarged relations which we immediately sustain to the 
world about us, and to the Kingdom of Heaven in it. 
Each deeper insight into God's government will issue in a 
new apprehension of his purposes, new joy in them, and a 
new fellowship of labor with them. We believe that the 
Lord does reign, and that the earth has therein an ever 
renewed occasion to rejoice. We wish, therefore, to indi- 
cate, as they present themselves to us, some of the condi- 
tions and directions of this government. 

We stake all on liberty, the dynamics of mind. Noth- 
ing can be proved in religion without it, nor without it is 
any thing as knowledge -of any great value. Between 



538 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

motion and rest, order and disorder, growth and decay, 
spiritual good and sensual good, real thought and the mere 
semblance of thought, liberty and necessity, we institute 
no comparison. The first are worth for us whatever they 
cost. No price paid on the inferior side can be too great 
for a gain on the superior. Nor is there any evidence to 
our mind that these intellectual and spiritual increments 
can be obtained on essentially easier terms than those 
granted to us. It is not necessary that we should per- 
fectly understand the government of God ; it is very desir- 
able that we see something of the frame-work of order, its 
underlying principles of wisdom and grace. 

It is objected that God, if we concede his being, must 
be either less than omnipotent or less than merciful, since 
omnipotence could create a better world than this, and 
mercy would prompt its creation. More is ascribed in 
this view of Mill and others to omnipotence than belongs 
to it. Omnipotence is simply unlimited power, physical 
power, the control of physical events. Power is not 
altered in this, its nature, by being infinite. It can not, 
therefore, compass a purely intellectual or spiritual end, 
modify the connections of thought, or the relations of 
virtue. If we can object to God's government on the 
earth, we are able to discuss its conditions, and the thing 
that seems to us should avail as freely in extenuation as 
in censure. We may, therefore, in this connection legiti- 
mately question the notion of omnipotence from which the 
objection springs, and oppose a better one to it. The 
activities of God are limited, not by outside difficulties 
nor inside weakness, but by the insight, the reason, under 
whose direction they proceed. God can not be rational 
without accepting the relations incident to reason, without 
putting power under the limits of wisdom. Power must 
not exclude wisdom, or the greater is swallowed up in the 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 539 

less. God is reason, and as reason he is a rigorous law to 
himself. Purposes, methods, restrictions are involved at 
once, are the lines of light shot into the darkness, the 
creative limits showing themselves in the without-form- 
and-void. So at least we must conceive God's action. 
To refer holiness to a wish of God, a holy and happy 
world to a creative fiat, is to destroy holiness, and break 
down the fundamental distinctions incident to the unfold- 
ing of a rational creation, is to merge all attributes, wis- 
dom, grace, right, in power. A solution of this sort in 
accepting no restrictions admits no order, and in the name 
of reason destroys reason. The created sinks once more 
into the uncreated, the rational into the irrational, and the 
work of God so far, returns to that first point of incipient 
will in which nothing has been established. Wisdom, 
righteousness are fundamental in the nature of God, give 
law to his power, law to the world, law to us. Power is 
coetaneous with them, but neither supersedes them, nor 
escapes them. It is not a question of omnipotence and 
mercy merely whether God shall make a righteous world, 
but also a question of the nature of righteousness, whether 
it be something that responds to power, or itself gives law 
to power. The fundamental conditions of God's activity 
are those assigned him by his own nature, and he can not 
get back of these. Virtue must remain virtue, reason 
reason ; each thing must receive and retain a nature, 
otherwise the brooding spirit is not one of order. Look- 
ing, then, upon virtue as something defined by its own 
character under its own law, and not responsive to mere 
power ■ also as so preeminent that its pursuit needs no 
justification, and its neglect is always censurable, we are 
merely left with the inquiries, What are the conditions of 
virtue ? and, Does the world seem to supply them in the 
best attainable form ? 



54-0 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

Righteousness is conditioned on protracted, intelligent, 
voluntary action, depositing itself in growth as strength, 
habit, sentiment, through our physical, intellectual and 
spiritual constitution. The spirit, as a free spirit, masters 
itself, establishes and confirms its tendencies, forms active 
and passive habits, controls its impressions, harmonizes 
them, and unites its activities to them, making character 
consistent and firm. Growth, under the existing organiza- 
tion of the world, is divided into two inseparable elements, 
the individual and the race. Each moral and intellectual 
problem is primarily dealt with by the individual ■ he is 
the only conscious, living point ; but the permanent organic 
products of growth begin at once to be stored up in and 
transmitted by the race. These products show themselves 
in new external conditions of civilization, in modified inter- 
nal physical powers and tendencies, in an intellectual 
inheritance of ideas, in ethical principles and sentiments 
wrought into institutions and customs. The individual 
initiates the movement, makes the invention, discovers the 
truth, forms the habit, enforces the principle, and passes it 
by physical and intellectual transfer over to the community ; 
the community holds it fast, and passes it, with its other 
possessions, by physical and spiritual descent to posterity. 
The community is the conservative core and frame-work 
of growth, the centre of accretion from century to century. 
The ultimate unity, the largest dependence of men, are in 
the race, though they are united to it through many inter- 
vening ramifications, of the family, the tribe, the nation. 
The complete growth of the individual is conditioned on 
the perfection of each organization of which he is a con- 
stituent, up to the most comprehensive one ; as the bud of 
the tree through twig and branch- and limb is united to 
the trunk, and assigned its position and vigor by them all. 

The organizing, living forces all go forth from the 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 54 T 

individual, all centre and reappear in him, finding expres- 
sion in his physical forces, intellectual affinities, spiritual 
affections. So the household is organized, so the nation, 
and so the household of nations, and with each enlarge- 
ment the impulses developed are more generous, more 
just, more spiritual. The vigor of the individual life and 
the breadth of the organization are commensurate. As 
physical elevation is given the bud of the tree chiefly by 
the trunk and the branch of which it is a part, so moral 
elevation is imparted to the individual primarily by the 
social combination of which he is a member. Sympathetic, 
self-sacrificing benevolence, a universal law of love, a rule 
of righteousness, must include the whole human family. 
It is in the action and reaction between the whole and its 
parts, between nations and nations, continents and con- 
tinents, that the Christian sentiment most vigorously 
expresses itself. Its primary precept becomes, " Go ye 
and teach all nations." The spirit of the cross of Christ, 
the spirit of self-sacrifice, one for all and so all for each, 
is, as few even yet conceive it to be, the law of salvation. 
The individual can not in growth dispense with this grand 
aggregate, this universal ministration, this coming in of 
varied enlarged life from all quarters of our spiritual 
realm ; he can not win the legitimate tributaries of his life 
till he bows every feeling and purpose to the broadest law, 
the most beneficent and divine sentiment. That which 
offers itself as self-sacrifice is in fact self-nourishment, so 
thoroughly organic is man with man in society. The 
world is the field of our present spiritual activities, and in 
turn must owe its unity to these our broadest, best tenden- 
cies. Whether, therefore, we will have such sweeping 
dependencies is simply whether we will have spiritual de- 
velopment, will make room for the interplay of our largest 
life. As the tree does not put forth its flower-buds and 



542 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

fruit-buds at once, nor mature them till much of its growth 
has been made, so we can not yield spiritual fruits till 
these enlarged, centralized influences come home to us. 
It is not the combination that begets the feeling, but the 
feeling which occasions the combination, the two sustain- 
ing each other. Missionary labor, if it were far less suc- 
cessful than it now is, would still be the most auspicious 
omen of good ; the coming to the light and creeping abroad 
of our spiritual, our race, affinities, affinities which belong 
to the nations of the earth as all of one blood, and capable 
of entering into one household of faith. 

We shall not understand, or rather begin to under- 
stand, God's government without a vision of righteousness, 
nor apprehend righteousness except as we discover it to be 
the product of growth; nor growth save as it discloses its 
two elements ; its vast command of resources, its exhaust- 
less powers of accumulation, its increasing ease of trans- 
mission ; and also the intimate,- narrow, private way in 
which it searches out every mind, establishes itself in 
every willing soul, brings to it wealth and adds by it, in 
passing, one more increment to the general power. Growth 
then holds largely the secrets of divine wisdom and divine 
government. Light is thus cast upon the terrible liabili- 
ties incident to these broad, delicate connections of con- 
stant inter-communication and onward flow. The rank- 
ling virus will penetrate the living body as it can not the 
dead one ; but we must not object to the living body that 
it is alive. It is an inseparable condition of interplay, 
beyond which we can not carry our objections, — unable as 
we are to replace this inherent reason and fitness of things 
which we thereby destroy — that it may be an interplay of 
evil as well as of good. Moral good remains good only 
by a contrast with moral evil, and a choice directed toward 
it for what it is. Light is not light unless its displacement 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 543 

produces darkness. The entail of sin, mischievous as it 
may be, is corrective, is the weight that lifts and holds 
before us in counterpoise the bright signal, indicating the 
ways of safety. Virtue is not a physical good to be given 
and enjoyed ; it involves the knowledge of good and evil. 
We feed on this tree first, and so on that of life. Liabili- 
ties that we know not how to dispense with, can not be 
objected to any one method, since they must attend on all 
methods. These distinctions and contrasts we believe to 
be incident to reason, as they are that by which reason 
proceeds in its work, that which it instantly ordains, and 
builds its purposes upon ; but if they are merely impressed 
upon us by our experience, we can not transcend them. 
Ultimate nature we believe to be the nature of reason, the 
nature of mind, the nature of God, imposing itself as a 
law upon things ; but if we are mistaken in this, and the 
ultimate nature is a nature of things, there is in this fact 
no infringement on power, as physical power, or of mercy, 
in God. What power can affect is not an ultimate nature, 
but changes within that nature, and infinite power can not 
be called on to do things which do not belong to power 
to do. What has not been made and can not be unmade 
is irrelevant to power. 

We must insist on requiring of power only what is 
within the scope of power, and objections which abolish all 
distinctions abolish also themselves. If God is right or 
wrong in doing or not doing this or that, then right or 
wrong is not power or the product of power or to be 
reached by power, but the intangible law that lies far above 
power. When, therefore, we object to God's government, 
we recognize those immutable distinctions of reason within 
which and under which power is expended, and is impotent 
to alter. We are ready to grant that larger capacities, 
quicker faculties might have been given to man ; but not 



544 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

r 

that virtue, intelligence, experience, any product of growth 
could have been directly conferred. It may be objected 
to the government of God that man is too feebly endowed, 
started too low in the career of growth ; it can not be 
objected that he was in the beginning destitute of the 
organized strength, the readjustments, the acquired ten- 
dencies, the ease and safety of action, he has now won or 
shall hereafter win. These are all conditioned on some- 
thing deeper than power. Would then the possession of 
nimbler powers, more active and vigorous faculties, give 
the race safer, better conditions of growth? There are 
considerations which go to show that it would not. The 
more decided the faculties the more intense is their action, 
and the more critical and dangerous is their trial. The 
experiment of discernment, obedience and harmony is car- 
ried forward with more heat, and its failure is more rapid 
and complete. Dullness of faculty and deadness to the 
moral conflict keep the issue somewhat in the back-ground, 
prevent a premature and disastrous solution, and allow 
favoring conditions to accumulate slowly here and there, 
and to initiate the activities of growth. Nothing is pre- 
cipitated. The disasters of restricted powers can not be 
so great, so deadly within the soul, nor so repulsive exter- 
nally, nor so universal. Opportunities renew themselves 
more readily, purely animal impulses sustain the spirit, 
cover up its failures, subdue moral features, and gather about 
the least incipient virtue, — courage, patience, or industry — 
as a single seed in the soil, and nourish it into strength. 

Enlarged powers, quickness of action, when not sus- 
tained by experience, give more strength to incentives, 
temptations than to restraints, safe-guards. This is inevi- 
table. The appetite, the desire come first, the correctives 
are developed slowly under prolonged and varied action. 
Brilliant faculties first reflect the heat of passions and 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 545 

quicken the impulses ; not till later are they ready with 
calmer, broader, wiser views to moderate the hopes, 
assuage the desires, and redirect the purposes. Experi- 
ence, on the present grade of human powers, shows us 
constantly the dangers which attend on any unusual gifts. 
Moreover, any considerable gap between man and the 
brute creation, the animal nature on which his spiritual 
nature is engrafted, is, in the earlier stages of growth, 
unfortunate. An intellectual nature pressed down close to 
the instincts of the brute; sustained by its wholesome, 
balanced, physical actions ; hard pushed by its urgent, 
hourly appetites, makes a safer start than one more free, 
and hence less guided. Breaks are no more favorable in 
the intellectual than in the physical kingdom. The ten- 
dency established below completes itself above. The 
higher is so united to the lower, so nourished by it, is in 
such relations of reciprocal interdependence, that an ad- 
vance at one point must be tempered by like advances at 
many points. Man's spiritual constitution is, by virtue of 
its physical dependencies, and by virtue of the field of its 
activities, organized into and out of the animal creation. 
The body must fortify the mind, and the victories of the 
mind must record themselves in the physical system, and 
sustain themselves by its modified functions. Virtue 
is defenceless, wages a losing warfare, till it has learned to 
entrench itself in the soil, and win to itself as subjects 
natural forces. To do this it must take the physical world 
into its keeping by continuous growth. One discipline 
now trains man and beast, the body of man and the mind 
of man. A gradation of faculties unite the dog and his 
master, the horse and his rider. Along the narrow paths 
of instinct, automatic action, brute intelligence and natural 
affections come impulses from below which soften, restrain 
and quicken human nature, as it assays its own higher 



546 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

fields. Larger intellectual powers would only serve to 
make devils of men, if less restrained by minor wants, 
minor sympathies, and less dependent on the instinctive, 
firm, disciplined forces of nature. There is much reason 
to believe that the trial of our moral strength would be 
much more critical, and might be far more disastrous, if 
our intellectual powers were sensibly increased, without 
being fortified by virtuous habit, and transmitted strength ; 
if we could be divorced from that below us, having as yet 
won no hold on that above us. 

At all events this is a question of degrees, and, where- 
soever we place the limits of endowment, leaves us with 
the query, Why not farther on ? It satisfies us to know, 
that the deep, strong roots of our animal, our semi-physical, 
nature are a constant support to our spiritual powers, and 
when these seem prostrate by the storms, afford our best 
hope that they will spring up again. 

It is also objected that the sufferings incident to our 
present discipline are great and pervasive. Are they 
unnecessarily great? The need must be defined by the 
ends in view, primarily by the moral ends. These incen- 
tives to effort do not seem to us too great, when we con- 
sider the material, the misinclined and disinclined nature 
they have to deal with. Man himself, in his crimes and 
cruelties, strikes a sharper note of woe by far than any 
refrain that comes up from the inferior world. The 
accentuation of grief lies almost wholly in voluntary action. 
That the motives to effort are not more cogent than man 
requires is a matter of observation. The temperate zones, 
the lines of medium hardship, on the whole give the best 
conditions of progress. The incentives to civilization are 
less in more lenient than in more rugged climates. The 
growth of nations has again and again been arrested by 
luxury, that is by an accumulation of easy conditions 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 547 

beyond the grade of virtue that accompanies them, even 
though these advantages have been won, grown into, not 
given. A second generation to whom wealth comes with- 
out exertion is as often as otherwise injured by it. A 
milder physical regime than that prevalent in the world, 
must at once be supported by unusually considerate and 
cogent moral influences, or it miscarries. As far as man 
is concerned there can hardly be to advantage, a serious 
reduction of suffering, save as it is the result of his vol- 
untary improvement. 

But pain is not confined to man, it pervades the world 
everywhere, reaching deeper into the organic system and 
farther back in time than his eye can follow it. There can 
be no doubt, that looking at the sufferings of the animal 
kingdom, first through the medium of high spiritual sensi- 
bilities, and second through that of the most perfected 
nervous system, we greatly exaggerate them. Letting this 
fact go for what it may, it is plain that the fortunes of the 
world must be the fortunes of its chief actor, that it can 
find no other concord than in man. Its independent 
strifes and griefs only put it in harmony with him. Cer- 
tainly no discord could be more painful than that of a 
world with a higher quality of mercy than ours subject to 
the caprice and cruelty of man. It is on this side rather 
than on the opposite that a want of fitness is oftenest felt. 
Nothing could be more unreasonable than to detach man 
from the conditions about him. His education, physical, 
intellectual and moral, is in the ties of interest and sympathy 
which bind him to the nature below him, which render him 
able to use it and abuse it, to mar it and to mend it. The 
whole creation must groan and travail together in pain. It 
is a very superficial view of the moral problem which 
would find any relief in divorcing a part from the fortunes 
of the whole, or make the connection of events less 



54-8 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

extended than they tend to be. It is our human finite- 
ness, contemplating things by parts and working piece- 
meal, which leads us to resent the deeply implicated and 
broad activities of the government of God. 

Another objection, urged even by such men as Mill, is 
directed against the justice of God. Justice, as many- 
understand it, a piece of mechanism transferred to the 
moral world, a tooth-for-a-tooth principle, a formal adjust- 
ment of rewards and punishments to actions, plays a very 
limited part in the divine scheme. It enters our human 
governments on their blind, feeble side ; it deals with the 
outside relations more than with the substance of conduct, 
its appearances rather than its spirit, the same action 
bringing much the same punishment, though the guilt of 
it ranges at large along the moral scale. If God, search- 
ing the heart, were to direct his omnipotence to an exact 
meting out of rewards, we, ignorant of the premises, would 
be still more dissatisfied with the results. Nothing cer- 
tainly could be more destructive of all high morality, all 
self-sacrifice and faith than the hand-to-mouth motives 
incident to a nicely administered system of rewards and 
punishments. If there is any one preeminent excellence 
in the moral government, it is this rejection of justice, so 
called. Justice, taking instant cognizance of every action, 
would destro}' all patience, all enthusiasm, all hardihood 
of virtue, and reduce us to day-laborers, returning at night 
each with his money in his pocket, and ready to complain, 
like those of the parable, if a fellow, servant had received 
the least gift beyond the regular stipend. A system in this 
way exactly right becomes one exactly wrong, and would 
reduce action to the most unendurable eye-service. Public 
charities, with well-advised and evenly yet mechanically 
administered rules, may, when applied to children, issue in 
the most sluggish, intractable, wooden characters. It has 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 549 

been found better, in the charity schools of Lcfhdon, to 
send children home at night, even to the most wretched 
abodes, that they may there give and gather some human 
sympathy, some patience, some personal discipline, than 
to retain them constantly under a merely mechanical rule. 
Family dependences sadly miscarry, yet with all their pas- 
sion, hardships and injustice, they rarely so miscarry that 
they are not better than the formal precision of a system. 
Life, infantile life, must be nourished on a human breast 
of some sort, and drawn close to some human heart. 
Exact justice is no part of a disciplinary system, is impos- 
sible of introduction, or if introduced would be most dis- 
astrous. It is a dead, inflexible rule ; not a living, varia- 
ble, sympathetic, quickening force. In the restricted 
meaning God's method is not just, and we are thankful 
that it is not ; in the large sense of the word, as dealing 
kindly, considerately, wisely with living impulses, as fur- 
nishing conditions of growth, we believe it to be just. At 
no point is the absence of what some would call justice, 
fairness, equality of opportunity more manifest than in the 
positions which fall by birth to men. A heavy entail of 
sin and disaster may descend on a child, a generation, giv- 
ing the most untoward conditions and the most dispropor- 
tionate burdens. Nothing could occur in more complete 
oversight of an equal division of advantages. Yet, on 
this law of descent, this organized transfer of power, turns 
the possibility of growth. The individual divorced from 
the community, and his inheritance under it, is a mere 
waif. The cardinal conditions of growth are provided for, 
conditions in which all are alike interested, and each must 
meet the liabilities incident thereto. Any man may rightly 
be called on to die for the state, though all do not die for 
it ; nay, that all may not die for it. It is better that it 



550 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

should b% so ; thus it is that selfishness and sin are espe- 
cially worsted in the conflict. 

Explaining, then, all things by growth, finding our lines 
of insight along its directions, we wish to mark some of 
the laws incident to spiritual development. Kindred and 
supplementary truths have an order of enforcement which 
makes every stage partial, preparatory in reference to sub- 
sequent ones ; as truly so in religion as in science. This 
fact we will illustrate in several directions. The relatively 
ultimate truth is that God is equally present everywhere, 
and can be approached alike by all. Not till this fact is 
understood and rejoiced in, can the religious life achieve 
its true freedom and universality. Yet, in rude periods, a 
tendency the reverse of this truth is present for two reasons. 
Languid faith, not being able to lay hold of the omnipres- 
ence of God, is strengthened by a sense of peculiar manifes- 
tations at special times and places. Moreover, till a true 
reverence is well established, a local worship must be main- 
tained, with a priesthood and system of interventions 
guarding the veneration and devotion of the devotee, and 
rebuking the neglect of the irreligious. Holy places and 
duties must be withheld from that profane access which to 
the vulgar degrade them. The real relation of man to God 
can only be reached on its own level by these intervening 
partial methods. 

So also the power of God needs to be firmly established 
in men's minds before they can be entrusted with his good- 
ness. Goodness is easily associated with weakness, and 
readily degenerates into good nature. It can only have its 
appropriate effect when it is supported by a sense of the 
most independent power. In the same way the holiness 
of God must in disclosure precede his grace. Forgiveness 
loses its regenerative impulse unless it is accompanied by 
the most complete moral discrimination, maintains the 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 55 1 

firmest hold on the standard of duty, and concedes what 
it concedes in favor of that standard, that the forgiven one 
may the more easily find his way back to it. In keeping 
with these partial views which the mind necessarily takes 
of the character of God, establishing it first on one side 
and then on another, Abraham and Moses expostulate 
with God as a ruler, and seem more tender than he toward 
the disobedient. 

It was in favor of the omnipotence of God, the strength 
of his government, urged on a nation too easily forgetful 
of it, that the prophet employed the fearfully vigorous and 
limited language, "The Lord shall go forth as a mighty 
man, he shall stir up jealousy like a man of war ; he shall 
cry, yea roar; he shall prevail against his enemies." 

For a like reason it is that the decrees of God, his 
intervening grace, are first urged on the church, before the 
liberty and responsibility of men are fully enforced. In 
dark and discouraging periods men do not so much desire 
a fresh presentation of their own powers as of the power 
of God ; do not so much covet a human method as a divine 
method in which to trust. They wish to feel the work to 
be God's, the issue his, the manner his in some supreme, 
overruling way. They magnify his presence on the super- 
natural side, and so secure a cloud and a flame to rest on 
their tabernacle, and go before it. This is a healthy ten-" 
dency, for thus do they then best develop their hopes and 
efforts. " Pelagianism was the less inspiring and edifying 
doctrine, and the sense of being in the divine hand was 
the feeling which it was good for Christians to be filled 
with."* 

Yet there comes a time when moral forces are more 
thoroughly operative, when God's presence is found in 
them, and personal judgment and responsibility need to 
* Paul and Protestantism, p. 164. 



552 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

be quickened under them, and the human elements taken 
up in an active not a passive way into the divine gov- 
ernment. Augustinianism and Calvinism must now give 
ground, retire to their own limits, and lose perhaps even 
a portion of them. 

It is inevitable in the beginning that men should think 
the chief difficulty to be in their circumstances, their exter- 
nal surroundings, and not in themselves ; that they should 
look forward therefore to a Kingdom of Heaven offering 
new conditions of happiness, and have their attention 
directed to its attainment, rather than to the correction of 
their own desires. Rewards and punishments would be the 
chief incentives to action so long as the attention was 
directed outward, and these would be gathered together on 
either hand in heaven and hell, with physical representa- 
tions which to later periods might seem repulsive in their 
vividness, at war with the more pure, sympathetic, spiritual 
movement on which the thoughts of men were entering. 
The dark clouds of wrath which lie low in the morning 
may be drunk up at mid-day by the cheerful, warm light 
of love, and that too with no loss to the vigorous, ruling 
forces present. Governments, first of power, then of power 
and wisdom, then of grace, gathering us up in a free, living 
way, and planting within our own spirits the fountains of 
youth and hope, these are the spiritual transitions which 
Christian experience necessarily makes. Yet government 
true and strong must survive in them all ; if this notion is 
let slip, the whole process miscarries. Coincident with 
this change is that in the spirit of the obedience rendered. 
It starts with a quick adhesion yielded to the letter of the 
law; it ends with an exhaustive, ever-returning inquiry into 
its spirit. In the beginning the mind dares not to be free, 
in the end it dares not to be otherwise than free, since so 
alone can it be faithful. A like change takes place also 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 553 

in the conditions of union. Men are first coerced into 
order, as soldiers in an army, with an arbitrary statics ; 
later they fall into order, as citizens in a community, by 
virtue of each seeking his own. Christians come to under- 
stand that there is more harmony in cheerfully conceded 
diversities than in constrained uniformities. 

Nor are we able to feel that sin can be freely forgiven 
so long as God's government maintains its external cast ; 
is a sort of criminal procedure ; but when it comes to be 
corrective, incorporate, constitutional, then we see that 
forgiveness extended to real repentance is cleansing, sav- 
ing, blessed ; that God can no more withhold it than man 
can dispense with it ; that with both it is a moral necessity, 
not a mere volition. We must tarry in the truth that is 
nearest our experience and so pass to the next. God does 
not forgive sin, God can not but forgive sin, are both 
assertions true to different states of mind, and under 
different lights ; yet the second is much the more profound^ 
statement. 

There is one other general order in growth which 
should be stated more fully — our apprehension of the 
natural and supernatural. Men start with theories, sug- 
gestions, taken from their own experience. They believe 
in their own freedom, and with it spiritual beings and 
interventions find easy admission. The world is explained 
in a grossly anthropomorphic way. There is no proper 
supernatural, for there is no proper natural ; the two are 
blended confusedly. It is an era of superstitions in 
religion, and of remote, fanciful explanations in science. 
The soul as personal yearns for the personal, and finds it 
everywhere. The sympathies claim their own, and quite 
displace the thoughts. 

Then necessarily in progress comes a second move- 
ment. The mind is thrown outward in more honest 
24 



554 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

inquiry. Laws are discovered, enlarged ; establish in 
thought a new tendency, and lead to new estimates. 
Settled conviction springs up, and this gains coherence 
each year ; the scientific, the cosmic spirit is born, and 
matures in conflict with that of faith. We have the natural, 
but the supernatural is escaping us. 

Is this the end? Certainly not. No second move- 
ment can assure itself of correctness by the entire displace- 
ment of an earlier one. If the first was wholly wrong, the 
second is probably no better. It in turn shall exhaust 
itself, and give way to a third, equally futile. The second 
can establish its own value, and make way for the third, 
only on the ground that it has included the first, or is ready 
in passing to an advanced position to unite with it. Science 
is of the utmost value, if it supplements philosophy; miss- 
ing this it misses its own ministration. If science destroys 
philosophy our losses are equal to our gains, and, what is 
far worse, our intellectual life is becoming suicidal, is dis- 
closing itself as a change of ruling impressions none of 
which are valid. Natural law is, in reference to God, an 
unfolding to us of his wisdom and power. Only thus does 
the Infinite spread out his thought, and put it within the 
reach of the finite. Here is wisdom made for man dis- 
tinct, visible, manageable. But if at the same time imper- 
sonal forces as impersonal are allowed to crowd back 
intelligence, to exclude personality, to render choice an 
incongruity, then, while finite facts are gained y the com- 
prehending thought, the animating life are lost. While 
the outlines of wisdom seem to be won, wisdom itself is 
disappearing. We have the volume, but the characters in 
which it is written have lost their suggestiveness. We 
have miscarried at our second lesson, and while heeding 
the word, it has suddenly ceased to be the Word of God. 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 555 

We must pause here or be remanded again to our first 
discipline. 

So on the side of man, a knowledge of nature and of 
her laws is the winning of power, is taking events from tli2 
region of will, as an undefined, variable force, and puttin ; 
them in the realm of law, of settled, manageable agents. 
Here are exhaustless gains. Every thing may now be 
done. Inquiry, counsel, work are in order henceforth. 
Yet this gain is an illusion unless man retains his own per- 
sonal power, unless he can think, devise, determine. If 
these acts are only a process within a process, parts of 
necessary forces ; or rather the empty, shadowy symbols 
which in consciousness attend on the physical agencies 
involved, then this second movement has missed its gains 
in laying hold of them, and far from finding for man new 
powers, has lost his old powers. It has made the discovery 
that the world of mind, whatever that world may be, lies to 
one side of the efficient, physical forces which construct, 
guide and control the world of matter, and only rehearses, 
in a second-hand, inefficacious way, the action of agencies 
whose strength rests exclusively in material facts. It is 
the molecular, nervous changes which condition thought, 
and, what is far more, condition the next physical step in 
the series of changes, and these alone therefore that are 
of real interest. This second stage in knowledge is of 
no avail unless we sustain it by what was contained in the 
first stage. Nature without the supernatural overpowers 
the soul by the excess of law, as much as the supernatural 
without the natural overpowers it by the absence of law, 
of fixed conditions of action. 

A partial, anthropomorphic movement is one of confu- 
sion, in which the two terms of rational life, the necessary 
and the free, causation and spontaneity, are confusedly 
blended, the second encroaching on the first apparently to 



556 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

magnify its own power, but really to subvert it. The 
cosmic tendency, as an excessive one, does not so much 
confound the two fields as strenuously assert the existence 
of the one, and as strenuously deny that of the other. 
There must come a third effort in which science and 
philosophy shall cordially unite, shall strive to enclose 
between them the territory of knowledge, to recognize its 
partite character and divided law, and to complete the 
sphere of life by giving it its opposed hemispheres. So 
shall we reach a higher unity, shall see that the natural 
calls for the supernatural, the supernatural for the natural ; 
and that while neither is lo§t in the other, they blend with 
each other in constant support and ministration. The 
natural expresses the supernatural, and the supernatural 
gives to the natural its value and suggestive power. 
Either perishes by itself ; together they abide, the noumena 
and phenomena of one synthetic, living system ; a universe 
with a soul in it. 

We return to the two elements in growth, the race and 
the individual. The individual best represents the super- 
natural element, — let us remember that the supernatural is 
never wholly supernatural, but is always at work in the 
midst of nature, acting on it and acted on by it — and the 
race the natural element. The race, in its physical forces, 
its possessions, institutions, tendencies, stock, is some- 
thing done, is ground gained, reliable, permanent forces 
put at the disposal of all. The individual, while resting 
back on these incorporate, organic agencies, and largely 
controlled by them, may yet add something to them, may 
bend them to his own work, may act on them as well as 
with them, his own feet touching the ground in the sweep- 
ing current by virtue of his individuality. 

The grand depository of growth, the store-house of its 
increasing and inexhaustible winnings, is the race. Moral 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 557 

growth involves the highest law operative in the largest, 
hence the entire, field, and so includes all growth. It 
includes physical growth, that is, a physical organism 
established with transmissible forces, blood-currents in 
which health, strength, the needful conditions and needful 
instruments of virtue are lodged by sire and son for 
themselves and for all. It includes that material growth 
also by which the powers of nature either yield themselves 
to our service, or soften themselves to our safety ; by 
which the burdens, the grievous ones of life, are shifted 
from sensitive to insensate shoulders, where they may rest 
unwearyingly. It includes intellectual growth, that involved 
in the mastery of nature, and that which gives the spirit 
the yet better mastery of itself, freedom, alertness, vigor 
and grace of movement, all we are learning to cover by the 
word culture. It includes that religious growth by which 
these conditions are made to minister to the affections, 
enrich and purify the heart, deepen, cleanse and spiritual- 
ize its emotions, and send them out, like the streams of 
Eden, parting to the four quarters, for the refreshment of 
every goodly thing. 

When we remember that in this race-growth all, abso- 
lutely all, must be included ; that the moral sympathies, 
the spiritual life will no more suffer gaps in its organic 
action, omission in its collated material, than the physical 
life ; that its gains must be incorporated slowly by inherit- 
ance and for inheritance into the physical forces of the 
world; that a thousand actions and reactions, modifica- 
tions and reconstructions are to set in ; that retrogression, 
retardation and powers prematurely spent may also inter- 
vene; that the movement itself, in every stage of it, is 
dynamic, passing on to something larger and fuller, we see 
how remote in its large sense is the Kingdom of Heaven, 
how close it is to us, how constantly coming as a pervasive 



558 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

presence, how many in how many ways are taking part in 
it, and how the natural, the complete, the established 
grow out of the supernatural, the incomplete, the transi- 
tional, the first ministering to and living in those living 
points of growth expressed by the second. 

Thy kingdom come is a prayer we shall not soon 
exhaust. It covers all effort, and makes for progress in 
all directions. No civilizing agency, nothing which puts 
man in better possession of the world, of society, of him- 
self; that enters as an agent of relief, of furtherance, of 
harmony, fails to become an element in that kingdom. 

The enunciation and enforcing of truths of society and 
government, of moral precepts and religious principles ; 
their establishment and incorporation into the constitution 
of man and society in a possession of the present and 
hereditary hold on the future, have given opportunity for 
the most diverse civilizations and religions, in one place 
and another, to take a valuable part in this race-growth, 
and to become integral with it. Every state and truth are 
transitional, and are to be judged by those which precede 
and those which follow them. If they have enlarged ante- 
cedent forces, and made way for subsequent ones yet more 
enlarged, they have helped to bring one or another portion 
of the race into a solid, marching column. There is in 
this no abatement of the value of the truths of Christianity, 
but the reverse rather. It is these that are showing them- 
selves able to consolidate the human family, and put it, 
nation by nation, branch by branch, in living cooperation 
under conditions of growing integration — of a purified and 
spiritualized union. To use, work, and carry on the living 
conditions at any time present is far more than to reject 
them, and remand the race to a new beginning. That 
which includes the most out of the past heads the march 
to the future. 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 559 

The religious hierarchies of the world have owed their 
influence to moral and religious ideas, to spiritual tenden- 
cies, blind and feeble though they may have been, and to 
superior intelligence. They have been, therefore, means 
of restraint and of progress. They have taken part, like 
other instrumentalities, and among the best and most 
vigorous of them, in the solution of the spiritual problems 
of their times. It is as much a mistake to speak with 
wholesale censure against the priesthood of the present 
and past as against the rulers and governments of men. 
Both have been tempered down to the low condition of 
society out of which they have arisen ; both have been 
tyrannical, and often been found, Apollyon-like, with threat- 
ening darts astride the path of progress ; yet both have 
been the central and indispensable condition of existing 
order, have disclosed the value of order, and have led, 
even when unwilling to accept it, to the proximate, preg- 
nant idea in the line of growth. We are to bear in mind 
that governments, ecclesiastical and civil, face backward 
rather than forward. They show their benign influences 
in reference to the things which precede them. They, in 
the beginning, gather up, knit together and enlarge some 
just tendencies, some organizing influences, and become, 
like the oracles and priesthood of Greece, an "effective, 
guiding and systematizing influence without which the his- 
tory of the nation can not be understood."* "They were 
possessed of the capacity and mission of becoming in the 
name of their God, the teachers and counselors, in all mat- 
ters, of the children of the land."t 

To subsequent ages, however, a priesthood readily 
presents an appearance the reverse of its earlier one. 
Like all tendencies in society, or in government, or in 
science even, the religious tendency, beneficent in the out- 

* Curtius' History of Greece, vol. ii, p. 18. f Ibid, p. 16. 



560 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

set and in much of its career, is likely to consolidate itself, 
lose fluency, and refuse to submit to the farther changes 
incident to growth. Hence religions disappear in dark- 
ness, as governments go down in tyranny ; the day closes 
in storms. 

We ought not to be misled by this fact. The religious 
training of a period, be it less or more, is the work of a 
priesthood. By means of it some foundation of ideas is 
reached which prepares the way for further work ; and 
more frequently than otherwise the new truths are pushed 
forward by a portion of the priesthood itself. They at all 
events furnish the point of departure, the line of divergence. 
The selfish, sluggish, conservatory tendencies of religion 
are incident to human nature, and can no more be objected 
to priesthoods as a specific characteristic than an inclina- 
tion to misapply power can be ascribed to rulers. The 
savants of science, with whom outside motives are reduced 
to their minimum, often get in the way of progress by vir- 
tue of the inertness of age, yet in such men alone lie the 
energies of growth, and from them spring the remedial 
agencies. No development can be denied its instruments. 
We forget that a priesthood is constituent with the period 
to which it belongs, and shares its limitations. Growth is 
not an absolute but a relative good ; it has its embarrass- 
ments, miscarriages and retreats, and yet stands justified 
in all its necessary agencies. The method is admissible, 
while censure falls freely on those who take part in it. 

In religion, as in philosophy, or as in law, every thing 
is changing, and each position, person, institution is to be 
judged by what has been, by what is, by what is struggling 
to be. Fluency, an easy power of change, must always be 
looked for in the individual, the seat of variety and growth ; 
permanence, resistance, the power to hold what is won 
must be sought in institutions, hierarchies, hereditary race- 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 56 1 

forces. In the rhythm of growth these are alternately 
uppermost, and beneficent or excessive according to the 
conditions transpiring. Time must be given to transmute 
the individual idea, the incipient, living impulse, into race 
power, organic structure, hereditary force ■ and this heredi- 
tary tendency, once in possession of its own, must be 
struggled with lest it exclude the next step. Individual 
power is ever returning afresh in a rapid succession of 
generations, to impress itself on the organic, continuous 
race-element ; and this, on the whole, in spite of its stub- 
born resistance, is not unnecessarily firm, when we consider 
that we commit to it, as the architect to the stone, all our 
labor. We quite assent to the assertion of Mommsen, if it 
is interpreted with the wisdom with which it was made. 
" The highest revelations of humanity are perishable ; the 
religion once true may become a lie ; the polity once 
fraught with blessings may become a curse; but even the 
gospel that is past still finds confessors, and if such a 
faith can not remove mountains like a faith in the living 
truth, it yet remains true to itself down to, its very end, 
and does not depart from the realm of the living till it has 
dragged its last priest and last partisans along with it, and 
a new generation, freed from those shadows of the past 
and the perishing, rules over a world that has renewed its 
youth."* We must remember that this new generation 
holds past truth as an organic, constitutional power, " an 
unconscious cerebration," and so possessing it, can well 
enough have a free, fresh consciousness for its own 
discussions. 

It is folly then to rail against religion as an alien ele- 
ment opposed to progress, when in fact it has been thrown 
up along the lines of development by the very forces at 
work. It is indeed possible that there should be a partial 

* History of Rome, vol. iv, p. 501. 
24* 



562 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

conflict between one tendency and another, between 
religion and science ; but it is a fact attributable exclu- 
sively to neither of the two parties, but to the more pro- 
found embarrassment that men and society are ignorant, 
sluggish, stubborn/ and hence movement in this medium 
of resistance is forced into a zigzag. Among priests, 
rulers, scientists are included the worst as well as the best 
of the phases of human temper. 

We find also in this relation of the individual and the 
race a solution of the question of unity in religious action. 
A unity that is external and coercive, that represses 
thought and narrows effort, is mischievous ; a unity that 
is free, organizing, harmonizing is the last and highest 
product of growth. So long as schism, sects are requisite 
to the due activity and specialization of individual powers, 
it is better that they should, with all their evils, exist. 
When any church organization can hold personal activity 
without discouraging or curbing it; when the liberty 
allowed is not that of indifference, — in some respects more 
repressive than constraint — but comes with a proper esti- 
mate of its value, and a desire to appropriate and develop 
its advantages, then union is organization, and has all the 
worth of growth. Though these words are figurative, and 
by no means self-explanatory in any given set of circum- 
stances, they may, none the less, direct our inquiry; a 
consolidation is good which unites and organizes activities 
without an arrest of their tendency to specialization. Spe- 
cialization is the primary movement, and justly breaks away 
from any combining force that checks it, either by violence 
or inertness. Our own civil government is a fortunate 
construction, because it strives, in a living, vigorous way, 
to unite without smothering the activities incident to a 
divided development. The English Church, if it can 
gather in dissenters without repressing their powers, the 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 563 

adaptations, incident to each denomination ; if it can com- 
bine diverse developments, just tendencies, and make 
them serviceable in a single, vigorous, varied church polity, 
doubtless has the claims on the conscience which an ear- 
nest advocate, like Matthew Arnold, thinks it to possess. 
Hitherto, however, to restrain dissent would have been as 
a rule to check specialization, restrict thought, repress 
power ; would have been, therefore, to secure a dead unity 
in place of dividing and enlarging life. The tendency is 
to seek after premature, artificial, extended organization. ■ 
A real unity is one of the last things to be reached, and 
one of the easiest when its conditions are ready. It is 
a result incident to progress, rather than the aim of 
progress. 

We see, then, if not perfectly, yet with some insight, 
that there is a government of God in the world by growth ; 
that the conditions of growth, if not in their present and 
previous features visibly the very best, aie so excellent as 
to preclude on our part, in view of all the liabilities of 
change, a well-grounded assertion of defect; that these 
conditions are subject to the perversion and misuse which 
are incident to sin ; that they easily improve, gaining great 
momentum for good under skillful, faithful development ; 
that the one difficulty which turns admirable opportunities 
into formidable difficulties is the evilly disposed will of 
man ; and that the one harmonizing and light-giving pro- 
cess in the spiritual as united with the physical universe 
and ministered to by it is growth, growth hinging on the 
free unfolding of human powers under conditions steadily 
forced back to the line of ministration, and never for an 
instant allowed to usurp the field. 

This growth is a moral growth, and implies a deep- 
seated moral government, one resting on the primary 
impulse of love. This is made plain by the fact, that the 



564 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

secondary conditions of progress come to speedy arrest 
unless society, by a coordinate moral development, is 
organized through and through on principles, first of right- 
fulness, later of mutual respect, and last of spiritual affec- 
tion. Let a line be run anywhere in society, at any stage 
of development, the life on either side of which is morally 
divided in opportunities and discipline, and it will show 
itself a line of conflict, of disorganization, of arrest and 
overthrow. Along this line will be begotten malign senti- 
ments, passionate prejudices, cruel tyrannies, which, scat- 
tering as seeds of mischief either way, will abide their time 
to spring up, a harvest of overshadowing evil. It will be 
a path for the thunderbolts of war to travel, once in the 
air under the heat of anger. There is then a government, 
one which gains light and force as it proceeds, a free gov- 
ernment, announcing as its ultimate principle of union, 
" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and its ultimate 
symbol, the cross of Christ, the cross of sacrifice. That 
the poor have the Gospel preached to them is the primary 
proof of the Christian faith, and no faith can organize 
growth that can not pass freely in its interchange of activ- 
ities, opportunities, affectionate ministrations every line, 
and unite in one all things. 

If we were to contrast science and religion as redemp- 
tive agencies, it would be at this point. However extend- 
edly science may furnish the means of benevolence, it can 
not give its motives. There is no reason why the scientist 
should be more benevolent than another, better able than 
another to conquer the discords of society, and unite in 
life within itself this rational kingdom, save as he sees 
more clearly and feels more strongly the force of a moral 
government, and of spiritual incentives. To his own soul 
is instantly transferred the conflict involved in continuous 
social growth ; it passes from the scientific, the abstract, to 



LINES AND CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS. 565 

the spiritual, the sympathetic thoughts, and there is settled. 
Having won the living impulse, he goes back to science 
for the means of making it effective. Religion must lead, 
that is use, science ; science can not lead, that is use, 
religion. Religion perishes under science, science thrives 
under religion, true religion. There is but one basis for 
union. 

Yet there is a sense in which science leads religion. 
The religious impulse must look to science to guide it in 
reaching its ends. Every law of nature, of the mind and 
of society, gives new conditions to religious activity, to 
that wise, faithful effort by which perfect mastery and per- 
fect possession are obtained. Not only must science 
devote itself to the service of religion, religion must sub- 
mit itself to science in denning and reaching its own ends. 
Only so is it religion, obedient to the laws of God. 

When we clearly understand that the individual can 
not reach perfection without the perfection of society in its 
entire membership, the grander organization of which 
each man is a constituent ; that society can only perceive 
or secure its ends by successive stages, as the conditions 
of virtue are wrought into it as hereditary strength, and the 
world brought into general and easy subjection ; and that 
this physical mastery must itself be proportionate to the 
intelligence and virtue from which it springs, it becomes 
plain that the Kingdom of Heaven is yet remote, that 
nature and society are working slowly toward it under the 
guidance and force of individual lives. Society is a grand 
aggregate, the universe a wonderful instrument, a mechan- 
ism whose momentum is something terrible ; yet neither 
overshadows man, as both ultimately yield to him, and in 
the form and measure of their ministration grow up with 
and under his free powers. Nor is man, the single man, 
left narrow, finite, partial in his growth ; he remains an 



566 A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

organic constituent fed by every force in nature and every 
power in the spiritual world, all struggling together td 
round out and fill full this his being. The road along which 
the race is led, even in its earthly journeying, is a long 
ascending one, a glorious one, and may well stand in con- 
nection and interchangeable sympathy with an immortal 
life. Indeed, as we contemplate this march upward of 
the human spirit into light, ushered and attended by all 
the expanding powers of nature, gathering and combining 
multitudes that no eye can measure, we can have but one 
feeling concerning it, that it is the consummate wisdom of 
God which so unites matter to mind ; and lifts both into 
and links them with his spiritual kingdom; that this visi- 
ble, gala procession enters the courts of a temple ample 
enough for all its unfolding and worship. 

Nor is the end near. We are in the first stages of 
intellectual growth, with a merely incipient, spiritual move- 
ment. The enthusiasm of love, of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
takes but partial possession of a few minds. The pulse 
beats with the fever of acquisition, of action, of knowledge, 
of nature to be subdued to service, and only rarely is 
quickened with redemptive love, that, throbbing in sympa- 
thetic life-stroke with the heart of Christ, yearns over the 
race of men. Last shall come man in the image of God, 
and that which all along had been good, shall become very 
good j the spiritual passing to its preeminence, love strait- 
ened at no point in its service. 

" This fine old world of ours is but a child 
Yet in the go-cart. Patience ! Give it time 
To learn its limbs ; there is a hand that guides." 






> , o « c . •*> 



^ v* N 






^ v* 










H -7*, \ ^ 












^ ^ 
^ \ 






^ 




^ V 



% % 

& 



\0o, 



kV ^ 









^ 






"^ <1> „ rEV\\ 



A ^ * t \T 



Ipti ■ 

W'Wm 1 

HH| its 

■■Hi ISii 

■■■■■Hi 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

022 208 203 1 




m 






stiff 



